


a fortitude of hearts and minds

by Edoro



Series: the universe is shaped exactly like the earth [3]
Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Undeath (Miraculous Survival Style), Detta Walker (is her own content warning), Drawing of the Three - rewrite, Dubious Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, M/M, Multi, Sexual Content, Sexual Violence, Susannah makes a well-meaning but incorrect assumption, The Mindscape, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, bear attacks galore, fucking a demon is never pleasant, genital trauma, people actually talking about things, positive but period typical reactions to queerness, spooky psychic shit galore, today on A Very Special Episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2020-02-04 08:42:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 135,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18601036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edoro/pseuds/Edoro
Summary: Ka's wheel turns. The Turtle sings. All things serve the fuckin' Beams.(On another level of the Tower, things go a little differently. This time, when Roland travels down the beach of the Western Sea and draws his three, they are not the only allies he has in the world.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the first installment of the third installment of the rewrite series! This fic will include both Drawing of the Three and The Waste Lands, as well as the end of the riddling contest.
> 
> All previous tags and warnings apply. Additonal ones will be added as they become relevant. Enjoy!

_ North _ , the spook had said - well, not  _ said _ , the spook was in a bad enough way he couldn’t talk. Eddie thought there must be some hellacious swelling going on in the spook’s throat. Eddie had at one point been pretty sure the spook was going to just keel over and die, but he had come to the regrettable conclusion that the guy intended to live, and furthermore, that he was stuck with the guy for a good long while.

_ North _ , he’d insisted. Eddie was down with that, Eddie was cool, Eddie was picking up what the daffy fever-wracked bastard was putting down. North, sure, it beat sitting here with his thumb up his ass trying to figure out which nightmare bugs were real and might tear his face off and which were just the DTs.

But there was just one little fly in that particular ointment. Eddie wasn’t exactly ready to run a marathon, but Roland couldn’t even  _ talk _ , much less get up and walk.

And for all his starved and ragged appearance, the son of a bitch was heavy. He overtopped Eddie by more than half a foot - guy was definitely a six footer at least - and his gaunt body was still corded with muscle. 

Eddie’d tried lifting him. He’d gotten down on one knee in the sand, slung Roland’s limp upper half over his shoulder, and even managed to stand up, but as soon as he’d taken a step forward, his spine and knees had started screaming. Maybe if he’d been awake it would have been different, but the lax, lolling, dead weight of him in this state was too much for Eddie to manage.

“Okay,” Eddie muttered to himself. “Okay. Plan B. Get creative.” Talking to yourself was kind of a weirdo thing to do, but with Roland out the silence of the place was just too much.

There was the endless grind of the tide, sure, and the screaming of the gulls, and the ceaseless blowing voice of the wind - but to Eddie, used to the daytime sounds of a city stuffed to bursting with over a million souls, all that just added to the crawling sense of desolation.

It was  _ creepy _ , was what it was. Even Roland’s voice would have been welcome. Anything to make him stop feeling like he might be the last living man on the whole planet.

A sled, that was what he needed. A sled or a stretcher or - or something, something he could strap Roland to and haul him on.

“Where’s a fuckin’ Radio Flyer wagon when you need one, huh?” Nevertheless, an idea was beginning to take shape, and Eddie thought he might actually be able to make it.

A couple determined hours of foraging got him the branches he needed. These he hauled in two armloads back to the place he’d let Roland drop, and then the real work began.

Laying out the shape of what he wanted was easy enough. Two long, nearly straight branches formed the struts of the thing, while numerous smaller and crookeder specimens would serve as the slats on which Roland’s weight would rest.

Putting it together, though, that was the real bitch-kitty.

“Shoulda taken fuckin’ woodshop in school.” Then he might have known how to carve a joint and fit the whole mess together like that. But he didn’t, so - “Okay, boy,” he told himself, rolling up his sleeves for good measure. They flopped immediately back down his skinny arms, but the sleeves of his  _ mind _ stayed rolled up, so that was fine. “You grew up poor, so fuckin’ jury-rig it, man.”

And jury-rig he did. He used the leftover tape from his ill-fated load of coke first, then started pillaging. The ties of Roland’s shirt - which might have once been a sturdy garment but had now been torn down to a jaunty little croptop - and hat went first, and then he dragged the laces out of his own sneakers.

Making the thing was frustrating and exhausting, but once it was done, a strange sense of satisfaction stole over Eddie. He’d felt such a thing before, he was sure, but not for a long time. Years, maybe.

It was - as Roland could well have told him, had he been awake - the simple contentment of having  _ made  _ something, of having used his own two hands to bring an object into being.

The thing looked like it’d been assembled by an epileptic in a disco bar and, Eddie was sure, would fall to pieces as soon as he put Roland on it… but he’d made it nonetheless.

And as it turned out, it worked just fine.

\---

He hauled Roland as far as he could that night, stopping only to kill and cook up another one of the monsters that crawled out of the sea at dusk.

(“Winner, winner,” he always chanted as he picked out his target, “seafood dinner.”)

After he’d eaten and made Roland eat, instead of curling up to sweat and shake through the night, he got back up and grabbed the handles of his makeshift stretcher again. He felt invigorated by the success of his project… and he wanted to know what it was that Roland was so sure lay north. Anything other than more of the same would be aces in his book.

“Mush, Eddie!” he cried to himself - provoking a clotted mutter from Roland - and on he went.

\---

The next day, monotony and soreness set in. His shoulders and back screamed, his legs hurt, and the wooden handles rubbed his palms raw.

Worse, Roland had begun talking. This was no longer unusual to Eddie, though he’d about shit himself the first time he’d heard the man’s fitful sleep-babble in the middle of the night. 

What was bad about it was that he was almost coherent, but not quite. He’d squirm and moan on top of the stretcher and mumble or occasionally cry out, hoarse and broken, and Eddie could  _ almost _ make out what he was saying. Sometimes he’d say a name. Sometimes words or whole sentences would come through -  _ Go then, _ he kept saying,  _ there are other worlds than these _ , and at one point for nearly an hour he crowed the word  _ nineteen _ over and over - clear as day, but then he’d lapse back into what sounded like another language.

Combined with the utter alien loneliness of the beach, it gave Eddie a near terminal case of the heebie-jeebies.

All that day he dragged Roland. When, at twilight, he saw another figure come striding briskly out of the gathering gloom, he almost didn’t believe it. For one endless moment he was sure, cross-his-heart-and-hope-to-die fucking certain, that he was hallucinating. That he’d finally cracked and his gibbering mind had made up someone else he could talk to while his only real companion burned up and died.

Then the uneasy thought came that maybe this was a ghost. Maybe one of  _ Roland’s  _ ghosts, called up by his babbling.

All this ran through his mind while he and the figure, too far away to discern any features of, stopped and looked at each other.

Eventually, the figure waved an arm in the air. “Hile!” it called, in a pleasant male voice with the same unplaceable accent Roland had.

“Are you real?” Eddie called back, unable to help himself.

A pause, and then bright laughter came ringing across the beach to him. “Real enough, or so I do believe!” And the man came towards him.

As he got closer, Eddie’s first thought was that - despite the accent and the strange greeting - this was a backpacker who’d hiked blithely off a park trail and into a whole new world. The man wore a pack, not just a knapsack like the one Roland called his purse but a proper back strapped to his back, with a bedroll atop it, and all manner of accoutrements hanging off it. Adding to that impression - and this was the perfect cherry on top of the sundae of Eddie’s disorientation - was the fact that he had his hair pulled up in a jaunty high ponytail, like some yuppie mom out for a jog in the park.

Then he got close enough for the last sunlight to glint off the guns at his hips, worn strapped to his thighs just like Roland.

Then he got close enough for Eddie to make out some features, and his first thought was that the guy ought to be stepping out of a jungle wearing a jaguar pelt, with a couple hundred smackeroos’ worth of gold hanging from each ear, reaching out his hand to introduce himself to Cortez as King of the Aztecs… or Chief, or whatever.

Then he got within arm’s reach, and Eddie realized the shadows on his face weren’t just shadows. This fellow might have been handsome - with that richly glowing skin and those high, fine features, sharp cheekbones and a nose you could crease a fold on - save for the fist-sized hole in the left side of his face, around which the bones under his skin had buckled like the ground after an earthquake.

He came right up to Eddie, then stopped, stuck one leg stiffly out to plant the heel of his boot in the sand, and bowed over it.

“Hile, stranger,” he said again as he straightened up. “I am Cuthbert, son of Robert, of Gilead that was, and I seek a man named -”

But Eddie knew that name - how could he not, when Roland was muttering and moaning and sighing it all damn day and night, asleep or awake? He’d gotten about as sick of Cuthbert - and what a fuckin’ name to saddle a kid with, a name that conjured images of stodgy old English knights, nothing like the man in front of him - as he was of Roland himself, and knew, before Cuthbert-son-of-Robert finished his sentence, who he was looking for.

“Roland, right?” Eddie hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ve got ol’ long, tall, and ugly right here, and you, my friend, are welcome to him.”


	2. Chapter 2

Roland’s buddy laid and lit them a fire with the unthinking speed and accuracy of long practice, and then hunkered down beside Roland. He reached out and brushed a sweat-matted lock of hair off Roland’s forehead. Roland moaned low in his throat, a convulsive, broken sound.

Eddie didn’t hunker. Eddie just sat flat on his aching ass in the sand and watched the new guy gently - almost tenderly - touch Roland’s brow and cheek, then reach down and carefully lift and inspect his mutilated hand.

“Oh, Ro,” he muttered. With care, he unwound the filthy makeshift bandage from Roland’s hand and then bent his head to sniff at the wounds.

“Yeah,” Eddie said when the guy pulled a face, “pretty grody, I bet.”

“Foul,” Cuthbert agreed, “but not putrid, I don’t think.” He laid Roland’s hand down on his chest, dragged his pack off his back, and started rummaging. He came up with a metal pan that looked like he’d maybe kicked it the whole way down the beach, and started with it down towards the water.

Alarmed, Eddie said, “Watch out, man. It’s almost time for the lobster things to come out, and one of those is what got your buddy.”

Cuthbert paused, looking steadily at him, and then put his hand to his forehead and ran it back through his hair while tipping a look up to the night sky that spoke to a universal human emotion, one Eddie had no trouble deciphering:  _ you gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’ me. _

“You’re telling me,” he said, flatly disbelieving, “that Roland - Roland  _ Deschain _ \- got half his hand torn off by one of the Curious Shrimp?”

“Eaten, I think,” Eddie corrected absently. Then the rest of the sentence really penetrated. “Curious - what kinda fucked up shrimp do you people have here? Those things look fuckin’ Jurassic, man, they don’t look like shrimp.”

“Yes,” Cuthbert said solemnly, “that’s what’s so curious about them.” Then he winked - Eddie was pretty sure it was a wink, anyway.

_How do you tell when the one-eyed man is winking?_ It sounded like a bad joke. Sounded, in fact, like the kind of joke Eddie might tell. He’d have to figure out a punchline.

“I wasn’t there yet when it happened or anything, but he told me he fell asleep.” Eddie shrugged. “Can’t blame a man for not thinking the ocean’s gonna spit up a bunch of man-eating lobsters.”

“Perhaps not, but I can blame a gunslinger for being foolish enough to fall asleep alone on a strange beach without so much as checking the tide line. Huh!” He kicked derisively at the sand. “Fell  _ asleep _ ! Cort would have beat his teeth out, and I’d have held him still for it, I would!”

And then he went down to the water, leaving Eddie to ponder that outburst.  _ Cort _ , he was pretty sure, was one of the names he’d heard Roland muttering. In Eddie’s opinion, the guy sounded like kind of a jackass, though Roland wasn’t exactly Miss Manners himself.

Cuthbert came back with a brimming pot full of seawater. He set it down in the fire, then hunkered back down beside Roland and looked at Eddie, head cocked.

“So, sai Eddie, tell me - how did you come to be in Roland’s company?”

“Well, it’s a long story,” Eddie hedged. What he meant, but didn’t want to say, was  _ It’s fuckin’ crazy and you’re gonna think I’m a lunatic.  _

“We’ve aught but time,” Cuthbert said. “The night is young, why not pass it with a tale?”

_ What the hell _ , Eddie thought.  _ Why not?  _ He was sitting on a beach in another world talking to a one-eyed cowboy motherfucker. Crazy was in ample supply.

At first Eddie didn’t think he’d be able to tell the story at all, though, at least not in a way that made sense to anyone else. Even though the whole sorry tale had taken only a day - not even a  _ full _ day, either - it felt like years in Eddie’s memory. In a way, it had been his whole life in the making, and that awful day when Roland had come barreling so rudely into his life only the culmination of the last twenty-four years.

As he spoke, though, the threads came together, and he found it was all relatively straightforward. The new guy accepted the idea of other worlds and travel between them without a qualm, though he had a number of questions about the nature of the portal through which Roland had first sent his mind and then his body, none of which Eddie could answer even to his own satisfaction.

Nor was that all he asked about. Where Roland had been singlemindedly uninterested in Eddie’s world except for when it affected him, his buddy Cuthbert had about a hundred questions about everything.

He asked what an  _ airplane  _ was and how it worked, until finally Eddie had to say he didn’t fucking know, he wasn’t a damn engineer. Then he wanted to know what  _ cocaine _ was, which was easier - when Eddie said it was a drug that hyped you up, he went  _ Ahh _ and nodded like he knew exactly what was up. That sparked a bit of hope in that beaten old dog part of his soul which he supposed would always be an addict - if this guy got the general idea of coke, why, there might be other stuff here too. Maybe they had poppies, or some shit like that.

From there they got sidetracked into a conversation that started with the whole concept of  _ illegal substances _ , took a bizarre detour through History Of Prohibition With Eddie Dean - an idea Cuthbert laughed derisively at and almost didn’t seem to believe was real - and ended with Eddie explaining Customs, the clearing thereof, and various methods by which one might defeat the scrutiny.

“Smuggling in your world seems awfully complicated,” Cuthbert said, to which Eddie could only fervently agree.

Around the time Eddie finished up detailing how he’d breezed his way through interrogation and been let go, the water in the pot reached a boil. Cuthbert pulled a rag from his pack, wound it around his hand, and pulled the pot off the fire.

While Eddie continued speaking, he methodically wiped clean first Roland’s hand and arm, and then the rest of his upper body. The ragged remains of Roland’s shirt he pulled off and tossed aside with a sniff of distaste. 

Once he’d finished wiping away the dust and fever-sweat of the last few days, he produced a clean shirt and deftly slid it down over Roland’s head, then stuffed his lax and unresponsive arms down the sleeves. It hung almost comically large on Roland’s gaunt frame, though it was clear whoever it had belonged to - surely not Cuthbert, not when it could have fit two of him with room to spare - was significantly shorter than Roland.

Watching this, Eddie was struck with a ludicrous sense of guilt. As if he should have been giving the guy daily sponge baths! No, as far as Eddie was concerned, he’d more than done his duty just by putting in so much effort to haul Roland’s ugly carcass down the beach.

Next Cuthbert pulled a roll of fresh bandages from his pack and began wrapping Roland’s hand back up, not in the clumsy fashion Roland had done himself but with the speed and familiarity of a man very used to doing this sort of thing.

“So do you just have a whole drugstore in there, or what?” Eddie couldn’t help interrupting himself to ask.

“Oh, I’ve any number of useful things,” Cuthbert said. “Drugs aren’t one of them, though. Might be I’d have brought something for fever, had Al told me Roland was in such a bad way, but I suppose he couldn’t have seen.”

Somehow, the idea that in this strange world there was a man named  _ Al, _ of all things, was almost too much for Eddie to accept. It was a name that belonged to a car mechanic, not a fantasy cowboy. 

“Al? Who is  _ Al _ ?”

“Alain, our other companion. ‘Twas he who sent me out to fetch Roland back, and high time it was, too.” 

“So, wait, you guys knew he was down here?” Was that why Roland had insisted on heading north? Because he knew there were folks waiting for him? “How come he was out here stumbling around getting eaten by sea monsters then? Did you send him out to like, scout the beach out or something?”

“Well,” and was that a note of defensiveness in Cuthbert’s voice? Eddie thought it was. “He wasn’t here until just recently, you know. We’ve been waiting. Al saw when he’d come back into our time and that he’d been hurt and sent me out just as soon as he could.”

Eddie’s head was starting to hurt. From the sound of it, magic doorways on the beach and other assorted fantasy bullshit phenomena were a dime a dozen here.

“Oookay, so, now we have time travel shenanigans too?” Another, more pressing question occurred. “How’d you know where he’d be or - or when he’d come out?”

“Al has the touch,” Cuthbert said, as if that explained anything. “He saw it in a dream. Sai Eddie, I’ll gladly tell you our tale, but first I’d hear yours to the finish.”

It was hard to gather up his scattered thoughts, but Eddie made an attempt. Gradually he got back into the groove, and resumed the telling of his story.

Talking about Henry was hard too. There was a raw place inside him that hurt to touch, when it came to Henry. He supposed that place would be raw for a long time to come, too. Cuthbert-son-of-Robert didn’t pry too much into that, even though Eddie skated over it as much as he can.

And though he could have sworn the whole battle at Balazar’s had happened in slow motion and taken about a hundred years, that he’d seen and heard every movement and bullet and spray of blood and scream, when he got to the telling of that part, it was all a blur in his head.

“I don’t remember the fight so well,” he admitted.

“Aye,” Cuthbert said, “‘tis common enough, especially for one’s first battle. The two of you survived though, and against great odds - you say you were naked at the time?”

“Bare-assed, wang wagglin’,” Eddie said. Even now, he could hardly believe he’d done a boogie slide into a firefight without so much as a tactically placed fig leaf.

“That would be a sight to see! I’m sorry I missed it.” Another one of those probably-a-winks. “An impressive feat as well. I can see why Roland wanted you.”

He might have said more, but at that moment Eddie’s stomach spoke up, grumbling loudly and at length.

Cuthbert slapped his hand to his forehead. “My apologies, sai Eddie! I’ve entirely forgotten my manners. My mother would be ashamed. You’re tired of seafood, I wot, and I’ve plenty of meat with me -” 

He went digging in his pack and came out with not only a feast of dried meat, but two skins full of water and a small bag full of round, hard berries as well. A week ago Eddie would have disdained such an offering, but right then it looked like Thanksgiving dinner.

He’d never been much of a fruits ‘n’ veggies kind of guy. Mama Dean had done her best to get some green shit down his and Henry’s throats on occasion, but his tastes had definitely always run towards the fast, salty, and greasy section of the food pyramid.

Now, though, the handful of berries Cuthbert had passed over tasted heavenly. He popped them into his mouth one at a time, savoring the burst of sour juice as he crushed each one between his teeth. Something in him, some animal instinct that lived in his guts and had virtually nothing to do with his brain, craved the fruit desperately.

Silence reigned briefly while they ate. Eddie tore into the smoked meat - what it was he wasn’t sure, except that it was definitely not cow - alternating with long, luxurious gulps from the brimming waterskin. The water inside had a weird, leathery sort of taste, no doubt from the container, but it was cool and fresh and most importantly, he hadn’t had to follow a piss-trickle of a stream for half an hour for it.

Cuthbert ate as well, though not with the same fervor. Eddie guessed he’d been having regular snack breaks on his trip down the beach, and not eating one lobster a day on top of hauling a comatose cowboy around.

Once he’d finished his meal, he tipped water into Roland’s mouth, then tried to rouse him enough to eat.

Roland did wake up, sort of. He groaned and half sat up, aided by his friend’s arm around his shoulders. He peered blearily up into the face bent over him, then closed his eyes and mournfully sighed out, “Bert…”

“Yes,” Cuthbert said. He tore a piece of jerky off with his teeth - for one horrified moment Eddie was sure he was about to chew it for Roland - and put it into Roland’s mouth. “‘Tis truly me, Ro. Are you awake? I’d speak with you.”

But though Roland accepted the meat, though he chewed and swallowed and opened his mouth for more, he wouldn’t open his eyes again. When Cuthbert tried to cajole him further, he simply shook his head and muttered.

As soon as Cuthbert laid him back down, he slipped back into his uneasy sleep.

At first glance, Eddie would have put the new guy somewhere between thirty and forty, or maybe a very fresh-faced forty-five. Now, though, watching the way he looked down at Roland, the planes of his face bathed in orange light and flickering shadow from the fire he’d laid, he looked about a thousand. The lonely weight of years hung palpably about him.

Eddie cleared his throat. “I think he’s getting better. We just finished up his antibiotics and, uh, I mean, he was doing a lot worse a couple days ago.”

“That’s heartening to hear,” Cuthbert said, but he sure didn’t sound heartened. “Only I thought he had recognized me, but clearly…” He waved a hand at Roland.

“Well,” Eddie said, “he’s been talking a lot, right, and your name’s come up a whole lot, only I think he thinks you’re dead, so, that’s probably why.”

That, finally, got Cuthbert to stop looking at Roland with that awful solemn grieving look. His head jerked up, and the expression he leveled at Eddie was almost a gape.

“He thinks - what cause has he to think us dead? Gan’s balls, for him it was only a month ere we were last together!” He scrubbed a hand back through his hair. “Gods above and spirits below, but I wish I could ask him what in hell’s name has been going through his mind.”

Eddie shrugged. “I don’t know, man, nothing’s made sense to me since I met the guy.” Something nagged at him, something about what Cuthbert had just said, something he’d said earlier as well… “ _ For him _ it’s only been a month, but you said he was doing some fucked up time bullshit, right? So… how long has it been for you?”

Cuthbert favored him with a narrow smile. “Ten years or so.”

A long stretch of silence followed that revelation. “Okay,” Eddie said eventually, “I think you better tell me what’s up with you guys.”

\---   
  


Cuthbert agreed wholeheartedly with that sentiment, but he still fell quiet for a long time after Eddie spoke. It wasn’t a simple tale, not by any means, and he couldn’t assume Eddie knew any part of it the way he might have been able to with folk from his own world.

To even be speaking so blithely of other worlds, with a man from one - ! Al was going to want to meet this man, the quicker the better. 

Something of great import was happening here. Cuthbert felt the looming weight of ka. That was how he had always thought of it - not as a wind as poor doomed Susan Delgado had once said, nor as the all-encompassing tide that Alain spoke of it as, but as a vast hand hovering above all, nudging folk hither and yon, sweeping them aside or smashing them flat, always there even when it wasn’t in motion.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Eddie said after a time. Here was clearly a man uncomfortable with silence. Cuthbert was well familiar with the affliction, being that he suffered from it himself.

“I’m thinking of where to begin,” Cuthbert told him honestly.

“The beginning’s always a good place.”

Cuthbert laughed. “You say true!” He liked this strange man Eddie. Liked him quite a lot, even though they had been acquainted only a short time. It had been a long time since he’d met someone who so reminded him of himself, and he was a vain enough creature to admire that in a man. 

A joke it may have been, but it was good advice as well. The beginning…

“Before there was anything,” he said slowly, trying to find the pace of the words to come in his mind as he spoke, “there was Gan, who birthed the universe from his navel -”

“I don’t think you need to start  _ that _ far back,” Eddie cut in, laughing.

Cuthbert smiled, though the gaze he fixed on Eddie’s face was serious. “I believe I do. It’s important for your understanding. Has Roland told you aught of us or himself or his quest?”

Eddie lifted a hand up, palm down, and wiggled it back and forth in the air. Unfamiliar though the gesture was, its meaning was clear. “He mentioned that he’s looking for some tower that holds up all existence, or something like that. Gonna be honest, I don’t remember that part so well.”

“Not just a tower, sai Eddie Dean of New York. We seek the Dark Tower, which is - well - it  _ is _ a tower, a physical building, we believe, but it’s also a sort of -” he groped for the word he wanted - “a nexus, one could say, of all possible worlds. There are many more than just our two, infinitely more, and the Tower is what holds them all together.”

“Okay…” Eddie Dean of New York sounded skeptical.

Cuthbert went on regardless. Skepticism was a laudable trait, and he had no doubt the man would believe him by the end of his tale. How could he not, when he’d been drawn from his own separate world to this one?

“In the beginning of all things, there was the Prim, the magical force from which all else rose. That was a time of demons and spirits and great magics. From the Prim rose the Tower, and from the Prim came the Beams which radiate out from the Tower, and hold it and all the worlds in place.” 

It was, Cuthbert was discovering, difficult to explain what seemed like basic history - nursery history, at that, learned while one was dandled upon one’s mother’s lap - to someone who had never heard a lick of it. He felt a mite ridiculous, spinning nursemaid stories to this man, but soldiered on regardless.

“The Prim receded and left behind the ones we call the Great Old People. They were makers of machines, those people, much like the folk in your world seem to be. They performed great miracles and built great wonders, but eventually they went to war, and with their wondrous machines they dealt such death it sickened the very earth itself.”

“What,” Eddie asked, “you mean like - like nukes? Radiation? You guys had a nuclear war?”

“I know not that word,” Cuthbert admitted. “There are places in this world where the ground is melted to glass and to simply walk there will cause a man to break out in sores and die. Mutants roam the land, human and animal both, and when I was a boy we had only just started to regain the true thread of either. Many of the old war engines still remain, and though all were in agreement never to use them, I saw my homeland destroyed by a man who woke them from their long sleep. Where the great castle of Gilead once stood, the only things that will grow are poison. That is what I know.”

The bitterness in his heart and in his own voice surprised him. He hadn’t meant to speak of the Good Man, though surely it would have been necessary to at some point.

“Sounds nuclear to me.” Eddie shook his head. “That’s fucked, man. But go on, I wanna know how you and ol’ long, tall, and ugly figure into this.”

“We are gunslingers,” Cuthbert said. “Of Gilead that was. Do’ee ken ‘gunslingers’? Do such exist in your world?”

Eddie shrugged. “Not really. Not like you and the big guy there. We got, you know, your policemen, your army guys, your gangsters, your crazy rednecks with shotguns or whatever. You guys are like some John Wayne shit. He was an actor,” he added, and then, in a teasing tone, “Do you ken ‘actor’? Do you guys have those here?”

Cuthbert liked this Eddie Dean quite a lot. “We have actors, yes, in plays and such. So this man John Wayne, he pretended to be a gunslinger for the entertainment of the folk? But your world does not truly have such men in it?”

“Something like that, yeah. I mean I guess we used to, you know, back in the day. The wild West and shit. Not anymore, though, not for a long time.”

“Well, ours does.” He cleared his throat. “A thousand thousand years ago, long after the Great Old People had all killed each other, there was naught but chaos in all the world. The rule of strength was the only law there was. And from the squabbling masses came a man, Arthur Eld, who with his magic sword and the aid of his knights -”

“What,” Eddie cut in, “like, Excalibur? Is this some Knights of the Round Table shit?”

This did not startle Cuthbert, although it pleased him. Their two worlds had to be closely connected, he figured, for Eddie to have been drawn so easily through, and he knew that closely connected worlds were often quite similar. That there should be tales of Arthur Eld where Eddie came from seemed only natural.

“Yes, the sword was named Excalibur, and Arthur Eld and his knights did all sit in council at a round table, as equals and brothers.” He smiled at Eddie’s open astonishment. “Would you like to tell the story, sai Eddie?”

“No, no,” Eddie said, waving his hands. “I want to know what kinda crazy cowboy twist you’re about to put on it. Go on.”

“Cowpokes and gunslingers are quite different,” Cuthbert said mildly. “But as I was saying… Arthur Eld forged a kingdom from the lawlessness and made of his knights the first gunslingers. From his sword Excalibur he had forged his own guns, for their metal is like none other on this planet. Those have been handed down the line of his succession, all the way -” he reached out and patted Roland’s thigh, not quite daring - even while the man was unconscious - to do anything so uncouth as touch his guns without permission - “to the man who lays before you.”

Another long moment of silence. Eddie opened his mouth, then closed it again, then opened it once more. Finally he came out with, in a mixture of honest astonishment and derision, “You’re telling me that this son of a bitch is  _ King fucking Arthur’s _ great grandbaby, or whatever?”

“Oh, it’s a far longer chain of succession than that. Nor is it direct, truly. The line of Deschain came from one of the Eld’s many gilly women, for back then a great many men and women both were barren, and true-threaded children were hard to come by.” Grinning, for he loved to needle Roland with this fact and had, on several occasions during their childhood, provoked him so far as to start a fistfight with it, “Alain and I are more closely descended from the first gunslingers whose names we bear than Roland is from Arthur Eld. Technically speaking.”

“Technically speaking, of course,” Eddie echoed.

“Not that any of that much matters at this point.” Cuthbert reached out and touched the back of his hand to Roland’s gaunt, fever-hot cheek, solemn once more. “Arthur Eld constructed the castle of Gilead, barony seat of New Canaan, where we were born and raised, but Gilead is fallen and gone, and of its folk, we three are the last. No one is looking at the scrolls of lineage anymore, I wot.”

“No,” Eddie agreed, “seems kinda pointless now. So...okay. You guys are all descended from King Arthur Wayne and his iron-packing knights, and you’re on, like, some kind of magic quest for this tower which, what, holds up everything?”

“A pithy summary, and almost correct in the bargain.” To hear the quest of their long strange lives summed up so amused him, but there was a melancholy edge to it. Eddie was clearly a man with a penchant for the ridiculous, a man who first had to speak the worst and meanest of every situation. He didn’t seem to be a cruel man, but the words could have easily become cruel in another man’s mouth. Cuthbert could have done it himself, if he wanted. Had before, in drink or simply bitterness of spirit. “Roland has quested after the Tower since the fall of Gilead. It’s under attack, you see, and it calls for him - for the line of Eld, of which he is the last. And surely even a man from a world of machines can recognize that if the linchpin of all reality were to crumble, there might be trouble.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Sounds like it. Look, okay, I get that, but what I don’t get is, okay, why me? Why Eddie Dean? I mean, I don’t want to rag on myself too hard here, but I’m just a junkie piece of shit, and before I met your buddy here I’d basically never even  _ held _ a gun. I’m not exactly, like, heroic quest material.”

Cuthbert shrugged. “I know not why, sai Eddie. Why any of us? Could you travel back a thousand years in time to when Gilead still stood and ask, well, many might believe Roland to be the last, but they’d laugh you out of town for suggesting a prancing jackanapes like me might have made it this far. Nor was there ever much out of the average about Alain, save for his touch. Yet here we are, when a thousand better men are dust and bones. Worthy or not, I feel the hand of ka putting you in our path, and it can push a moit harder than I, so there I think you’ll stay.”

The wind sighed between them, and the surf ground up the beach. Cuthbert fed a handful of grass into the guttering fire. It was full dark by then, and he’d spent hard days pushing himself on as little sleep as he could manage to arrive in time. He began to make ready his bedroll, spread out near enough to Roland to touch, should Roland reach for him in the night.

“Did you say,” Eddie asked eventually, in a rueful sort of tone, as if he knew well enough the answer but had to ask the question regardless, “a thousand years?”

“Oh, aye,” Cuthbert replied, distracted with the task of putting himself to bed. “That’s what folk say. Ask anyone. Gilead has been dust in the wind for a thousand years, they say. Of course, common folk don’t keep the time so well, so mayhap it’s only been a few hundred and grown some in the telling. A long damn time is what it all comes down to.”

“Only,” Eddie said, slowly, as if feeling around for the shape of the thought, “only you look about thirty-five, man. I mean, I don’t even buy that Roland’s that old, and he  _ looks _ like he’s been knocking around a couple hundred years, but you -”

For a moment, Cuthbert was truly surprised. He’d been truly surprised during more than a few parts of his talk with this strange man who hailed from a world of miracles, but had thought himself grown used to it. For a moment, he saw the things he’d said through Eddie’s eyes - not with any sort of touch such as Alain had, no, but simply by thinking of how it might come across to him, were he a man from a world of machines and ease, where time ran neat as a spit-dog in a wheel, all caged up and tame - and realized the strangeness of something he’d long since stopped even noticing.

“To begin with, sai Eddie, I’m closer to sixty than fifty. I’ve simply aged well. You ought to have seen my grandfather! He lived to be one hundred and twelve years old, and didn’t go fully grey until he was ninety.” He flashed a grin, and Eddie laughed, although that was in fact true. The man had died in the fall, or else he might have grown even older. “I’ve been hard worn, I have, in comparison. As for the rest of it…” 

Cuthbert threw out his arms, gesturing all around him. “The world has moved on. The Tower is under assault, and many things have grown strange as a result. Time is soft. Compasses are mostly useless. The sun hasn’t risen true east more than a handful of times in the last ten years. I reckoned the ten years since we last saw Ro by the seasons, but we’ve had seasons that lasted six months easy, as well as months that lasted six weeks, weeks that lasted ten days, days that went on for forty hours… You take my meaning, I am sure.”

“That’s so fucked up,” Eddie said.

“Aye,” Cuthbert told him cheerfully, “you have the shape of it alright.”


	3. Chapter 3

The next morning, Cuthbert shook him awake shortly after sunrise. Eddie rolled over and sat up with a long, heart-felt groan. It felt like angry elves had worked him over with hammers during the night.

At least there was food. Jerky and water was not Eddie’s idea of a gourmet breakfast, but it was a damn sight better than nothing, or having to kill his own breakfast. Once upon a time, what sure as hell felt like long, long ago and far, far away, Eddie Dean had at times bemoaned the effort of nuking himself a TV dinner. Now he thought he would have given his left nut to have to do nothing more than peel back the film, stir the potatoes, and stick the tray back in to cook for another two and a half minutes. For delivery, he would’ve given the right one too.

“You know,” he muttered over his morning ration, “I don’t think it’s fair to get a guy up this early without coffee. Do you guys have that here? Probably made outta fuckin’ acorns or whatever.”

Cuthbert laughed, entirely too cheerfully for the time of day. He’d hassled Eddie awake cheerfully, too. Eddie was beginning to suspect he was a morning person, which meant he might have to re-evaluate how much he liked the guy.

“We do have coffee, in fact,” Cuthbert said, “and ‘tisn’t made of acorns unless one is truly desperate. Al did try that once, but the resulting brew was too foul for even him to suck down, so we’ve lived dry lives for a good long time. He wakes up about as gracefully as you do, in the morning.”

“Sounds like my kinda guy.” Eddie just bet Roland was a morning person too. Not the jolly cheerful type like this guy Cuthbert, who woke up with the sun beaming out of their ass, no, but the grim drill sergeant type who thought laying around in bed after dawn encouraged laziness and masturbation.

“Oh, I’ve no doubt the two of you will take to each other. Let us get going, though, ere the poor man dies of old age before we finish dragging Ro down this fucking beach.”

\--

To Eddie’s eternal gratitude, once they’d gotten all packed up and ready to go - a process which took Cuthbert significantly longer, since Eddie didn’t have jack or shit to pack - it was Cuthbert who went to take the sled.

“Did you make this thing yourself, sai Eddie?” he asked, eyeing it.

“Well,” Eddie said defensively, “it isn’t like I exactly had a fuckin’ manual, you know. I kinda had to work with what was on hand, y’know.”

“Oh, no, no, I mean no disrespect. It’s quite a good effort, for a blind man wracked by palsy.” Cuthbert shot him a wicked grin. “If it’s held on this far, like enough it’ll hold on longer, and that’s all that truly matters, aye?”

“Sure,” Eddie said.

He’d imagined a leisurely stroll, unburdened by Roland’s weight. He sure as shit knew  _ he _ hadn’t been able to drag the stupid thing down the beach much faster than a staggering walk. Apparently his new friend Cuthbert here did more cardio, though, because he hefted the sled up effortlessly and set off at a brisk enough pace that Eddie kept having to break into a shuffling half-jog to keep up with him.

And not only did he pull like a sled dog, he still  _ talked _ while he did it, barely sounding winded. First he asked Eddie how long he and Roland had been on the beach, how long since Eddie had been drawn, and skillfully drew out what little Eddie remembered - and cared to tell - of that fractured time of withdrawal and sickness.

Then Eddie asked him, “So, what about you guys? You and your buddy Al. And this time-travel shit, what’s up with that?”

“I’ve many things to explain to you,” Cuthbert agreed. “First, you must understand that before Gilead fell, there was a man at court by the name of Marten Broadcloak, who was Roland’s father’s magician and close advisor…” 

This guy Marten, the story went, was a real piece of work. He’d boned down with Roland’s mom, tried to engineer Roland’s exile, and sold their secrets to the enemy. Eventually he’d run off, and eventually the city of Gilead had bitten the dust, and Roland and his friends had gone wandering around looking for the Tower and for Marten.

“So,” Eddie asked, “wait, you’ve been looking for this guy for like a thousand years? And you just caught up with him?”

“Oh, we spent a good few years trying to rebuild the Affiliation,” Cuthbert said breezily. “Fighting John Farson, trying to rebuild the civilization he’d destroyed - it all ended terribly, of course. Wasn’t ‘til after Jericho Hill we set off after the Tower in earnest, really, for then that was all we had.”

Jericho Hill had been the last great battle between the forces of John Farson and the forces of Gilead, and on that subject Cuthbert wouldn’t say anything else. He shifted smoothly into their times of wandering, the long years during which they’d often found themselves hot on Marten’s trail and other times found no trace of the man at all, as if sometimes he simply disappeared out of the world. Which, Eddie supposed, was probably something a sorcerer could do.

“Finally,” Cuthbert said, “and this is where it starts to matter to you, sai Eddie, we came to the edge of the great Mohaine Desert, which is on the other side of yon mountains. We split up to cross it, Roland going straight through on his own while Alain and I went north and west -”

“Oh, come on,” Eddie groaned, “splitting up is never a good idea. Everyone knows that. Is that how he ended up time-fucked? Because he ran into this wizard asshole all by himself?”

“Oh, neither of us would have done a mite of good for him in a confrontation with Marten, of that I’ve no doubt. Well…” He paused thoughtfully. “Alain, perhaps, for he is fearsome strong in the touch, but even he is not Marten’s equal. No, that came later. Roland split us up because Alain is lame and he didn’t wish to be slowed up.”

It took Eddie a second to realize that he meant that Alain had a bum leg or something, and not that he was just so terminally uncool it ruined everyone’s day. Even after he’d realized though, he said, “Well, jeez, you don’t gotta trash-talk the guy like that.” From the look Cuthbert gave him, it had landed very flat. Well, they all couldn’t be winners. Eddie waved a hand. “Go on, then what?”

“Well - then Roland came through and, evidently, met Marten. Alain and I went some distance out of the way, so he got across before we did. We came down out of the mountains a long way to the north, at the end of this miserable little beach - it took me about a week to get down here, by the way, though I wasn’t carrying a sick man - and came down to try and find Roland.” Cuthbert couldn’t really shrug, holding onto the handles of the sled the way he was, but he did make a noncommittal sort of noise. “We didn’t find much, but Alain said he was here, simply trapped in a time outside of time, and so we’ve been waiting ever since.”

“Sounds like a real fun time. At least you got a nice seaside cottage out of it, or whatever.”

“Oh, no,” Cuthbert said cheerfully, “it’s more of a cave. Quite a nice cave, to be sure, very snug and whatnot.”

Eddie looked down at Roland’s unconscious face, watching as his head jounced around on his shoulders every time the sled went over a buried rock or hummock of sand. Already he’d felt the terrifying force of iron will in the man, the strange raw magnetism that demanded he be followed, obeyed, listened to, looked to. Wasn’t he here, in this lunatic dying world, because of Roland? Even so, he couldn’t help wonder what kind of loyalty the man had inspired that his two best - and only, it seemed - friends would live in a cave for him for ten years, just on the off-chance he’d come back before they died.

“This whole thing is fucked,” he muttered.

\---

They stopped around noon. The sun was sort of wallowing around near the middle of the sky, but because Cuthbert had pointed it out, Eddie could tell how off-course it actually was from the way the sun was supposed to go, the way it had always gone his whole life. Though he would have been the first to admit he couldn’t navigate or tell time by the sun to save his own life, apparently twenty-four years of looking up occasionally and seeing it trace the same steady path across the sky day by day had left an impression. 

Seeing it so off felt  _ wrong _ . It wasn’t so bad at first, just kind of spooky, but he just kept thinking about it, and somehow it started to become not just weird but legitimately scary, and he kept looking up as if maybe it would be in a different place, but it was always there, near the middle of the sky but drifting off behind them to the south. Every time he looked part of him expected to  _ see _ it moving, like the world’s biggest billiard ball, and while he watched it would get closer and closer until it knocked into the world and they all burned.

A hand gripped him just above the elbow. He jumped at the unexpected contact, a startled scream halfway up his throat before he realized it was just Cuthbert.

“Don’t look too long upon it,” Cuthbert said kindly. “You get used to it so long as you don’t think on it too much. Come and sit and eat, instead.”

Up close, in the daylight, Eddie could see into the hole in his face. It looked much worse - much more real, even though he’d never seen an injury like that outside of cheesy special effects gore - than it had last night, softened by nighttime shadows. 

“What the fuck happened to your face, man?” he blurted out before he could stop himself. Rude as hell, even he knew it, but better than saying he couldn’t stand one more second in this fucked up impossible bullshit world. Better than just starting to scream and not being able to stop, and after the last couple of weeks he’d had, Eddie felt dangerously close to that.

Cuthbert’s mouth dropped open, and his brows drew down, and for a second Eddie was afraid he was really offended - he raised a hand, and for a second Eddie was sure he was going to get slapped, and that if this guy hit him, skinny as he looked, he’d sure as hell  _ stay _ hit - but then he just put his hand to his perfectly fine right cheek and said in a tone of genuine worry, “Is there something on my face, sai Eddie?”

They held like that for a silent second, staring at each other, Cuthbert looking like someone had just told him there was broccoli in his teeth thirty seconds before a photoshoot, and then Eddie burst out into helpless laughter, and Cuthbert broke into a grin.

“Sorry,” Eddie said once the laughter subsided and they were sitting down. “You don’t have to, you know, talk about it, if it’s touchy or whatever. I didn’t mean to ask.”

“Sai Eddie,” Cuthbert said dryly, “you’re hardly the first person to notice. I’m well aware of what my own face looks like, believe me, and I know ‘tis not the pleasant sight it used to be. As for what happened, well -” He touched the side of his empty eye socket, then drew the finger across, over the lumpy bridge of his nose and along the furrow of pale scar tissue that cut his right eyebrow in half and continued on across that side of his forehead. “A bullet hit me, like so. On Jericho Hill, that was.”

“Oh,” was all Eddie could think to say. There wasn’t exactly a Hallmark card for  _ sorry you got half your face shot off _ . “That sucks, man.”

“Oh, yes, but I’ve had a long time to get used to it. I used to wear a bandana over it, for they hardly make eyepatches big enough, but it made my hair look simply dreadful unless I had it tied up, and always kept slipping down over both eyes, and what use is a blind gunslinger, I ask you? At least half blind I’m still  _ half _ a gunslinger.” He went on parceling out food as he chattered, from the apparently endless supply of it in his enormous pack. “I find this lends me a certain roguish cast as well, does it not? Folk were much more likely to underestimate me when I was pretty.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Eddie had to admit. Before the grotesque wound, the guy must  _ have _ been pretty - damn near gorgeous, in fact, the kind of man a guy didn’t mind saying he might make a drunken exception for if the opportunity ever came up. And Eddie could imagine that in a rough world like this, there were plenty of people who’d seen the pretty face and not the hard and clever gleam of his eyes.

“Unfortunately,” Cuthbert went on, in a woeful tone, “I fear Roland has no such excuse for his face. He simply looks like that. He has since we were young men.”

“That’s a tragedy,” Eddie agreed as solemnly as he could, and then they were both laughing again.

A quiet, rusty sound interrupted them. At first Eddie wasn’t even sure it had happened, but then it came again, a little louder, and then he realized it was the sound of Roland trying to speak.

Immediately, Cuthbert was kneeling at his side, a hand around his back to help him sit up. “What is it, Ro?”

“Bert,” Roland croaked, reaching up first with his mutilated right hand, then putting it down and lifting his left to touch Cuthbert’s cheek, disbelief written all over his face. “Cuthbert… No, it cannot be you. I must… I must be dead, then, only…” He looked around, plainly exhausted and loopy but without the senseless fever-glassy eyes he’d had for so long. “This isn’t… the clearing…”

“You’re not dead, you foolish man,” Cuthbert snapped, his voice thick. He took Roland’s hand in his own, squeezing it tight. “Very nearly, aye, but if sai Eddie is to be believed you’ve come through the worst of it.”

“Oh, gods,” Roland said faintly, looking at Eddie and then back at Cuthbert. “I don’t know… that I can handle both of you.” 

And then, incredibly, he started crying.

He didn’t make a sound, no snuffling or sobbing or hitching. Tears simply started to flow down his face, and he put his arm around Cuthbert’s shoulders and drew him down into an awkward embrace, jerkily enough Cuthbert about fell into his lap.

Eddie looked away, face burning. It had been hard enough watching Cuthbert care for the guy with such obvious tenderness, but this was just too much. He hadn’t even been sure Roland  _ could _ cry. He didn’t want to see it any more than he wanted to hear it, or hear the way Cuthbert was shushing him.

Eventually he heard Roland say, in a hoarse and snotty voice, “I thought you must be dead, Bert. What of Alain? Where is he?”

He glanced back to see the two of them no longer holding onto each other, though they were still sitting close. Roland was looking intently around, his pale blue eyes fierce in his gaunt and fever-drawn face.

“Al is fine,” Cuthbert said. “He’s back at the home place. He had a fall and hurt his hip, the same way as that time those men set dogs on us outside that little pisspot wooden castle town, whatever did they call it?”

“West Creek,” Roland said faintly. “When he fell off his horse.” There was a dazed, dreamy look on his face still, and Eddie had the sudden feeling Cuthbert hadn’t forgotten the little wooden pisspot castle’s name at all.

“Just so, just so. He sent me after you. Had a vision, he did, you know the way he is.” Cuthbert puffed out his cheeks and threw out his skinny chest and adopted a low, cultured voice that Eddie could best describe as ‘wrestler who retired to teach philosophy’. “You shall fix my breakfast and do my mending today, for the stars have said it shall be so, and the confluence of the planets tells me you’ll wash my dirty socks as well, and all that.”

Roland didn’t laugh, but he did smile briefly. “It gladdens my heart to see you, Bert, and to hear that the two of you are well.”

“As it should! What I want to know, Roland, o dinh of mine,” Cuthbert said, tone suddenly severe, “is what led you to believe us dead in the first place. Have you no faith in the two of us, even after all these years?”

“Ah, Cuthbert, you know I’ve more faith in the two of you than any man alive.” Roland scrubbed his left hand slowly down his face, palm rasping against his stubble. “I don’t understand how it is you stand here before me, for when I came out of the sleep - out of -” A look came over his face of sudden realization, and he grabbed at Cuthbert. “The man in black, Bert, I finally caught him, and -”

“Yes,” Cuthbert said, taking gentle hold of Roland’s wrist. “And he is Marten-who-was, that old villain.”

“How -” Roland stopped and shook his head, looking rueful. “No, what am I asking? It was Alain, no doubt.”

“It was,” Cuthbert said, “and of how the two of us have been I will tell you, but first, tell me why it is you thought us dead. Sai Eddie here has reported you very insistent on the matter.”

“I held palaver with Marten,” Roland said slowly. “Long, long palaver. He put me into a magical sleep after, and when I awoke he was there in his place across from me, but centuries dead.”

“Roland… What makes you say so? For Al and I have been here the whole time, we have, nary a magical nap between us, and by our reckoning it’s been but ten years. Perhaps fifteen, or might be even twenty, for you well know how soft time has become, but no more than that.”

Roland dragged his hand down his face again, looking lost. It was an expression that had no business on his face. “I… there was a skeleton, Marten’s skeleton, wearing his clothes… Centuries dead, it had to be.”

Even Eddie could see the flaw in that one. “If this guy’s some big-shot wizard, couldn’t he just toss some random skeleton down in a robe and boogie out, like, just to fuck with you?”

Both of their heads swung towards him in unison, like they’d forgotten he was there. Cuthbert wore a rueful smile; plainly he’d seen it too. Roland still just looked thoroughly bewildered. 

They hadn’t known each other long, but they’d shared a mind, and Eddie had an idea Roland wasn’t the most imaginative guy in the world. Still, he wasn’t dumb, either, Eddie knew that much, and it was strange to see him struggle so. Maybe over the years he’d built Marten up in a way where he just didn’t see the possibility of a petty trick like that. Eddie, supplicant and follower of the Late Great Sage and Eminent Junkie Henry Dean, could relate.

“It… would be in his power to do such a thing, certainly,” Roland said slowly, frowning. Eddie didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone so unhappy to find out they hadn’t been in a coma for five hundred years. “In his nature, as well.”

“See,” said Cuthbert lightly, “this is why we oughtn’t have split up. I would never have been taken in by such an amateurish prank, Ro. Too much like something I might have done, were I still a boy.”

“I have certainly been a fool. A greater one than even my ka-mai, it seems.” Roland rested his forehead in his hand for a moment, then said, quietly and plaintively, “You say the world has not changed so much, and yet I feel I understand nothing any longer.”

“Ah, Ro, that’s fine.” Cuthbert clapped him on the back. “You never much have. That’s what Al and I are for, is’t not? Although, if you wanted to trade places, we could try that. Why not you take a turn being ka-mai, and I the dinh? I’ve always wanted to strut about issuing gruff orders.”

Roland gave him another one of those faint smiles. “I don’t know that you have the nature for it, my friend.”

“Oh, do let me! I can be serious, so I can!” He leapt to his feet, put his fists against his hips, and arranged his face into a startlingly accurate impression of Roland’s usual dour expression. When he spoke, the voice that came out of his mouth was eerily close to Roland’s. “Up and off your hunkers, Eddie, you slugabed! The Tower awaits! We’ll head west direct, and swim across the sea!”

“Not west,” Roland said. “North.” He held up his hand, and after a moment, Cuthbert took his wrist and hoisted him to his feet. “We head north, to the next of my three.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now we finally get to the second of our three, the inimitable Odetta/Detta Holmes-Walker!
> 
> Some of the biggest changes that I have made in this adaptation of Mr. King's works have been to the circumstances and narrative conventions surrounding the woman who will eventually become Susannah. Some of these have been for my own personal comfort (the number of n-words in this fic is zero) and some of them have been in the service of highlighting my own ideas about the way that things like race and ethnicity may have worked in long-lost Gilead. I have endeavored not to be too ham-handed about this, and to handle these subjects perhaps a bit more gracefully than the source material did while, at the same time, not completely editing them out of the story entirely. It is up to you, dear readers, if I have succeeded!
> 
> Further notes on this subject can be found at the end of the chapter.

Slowly, over the next handful of days, Roland grew stronger. That first day he rode still, though no longer did he moan and tremble in fever-wracked sleep. The day after that he stood and walked for stretches, and the day after that he walked the whole day down, though they took frequent rests.

And during that time, during those rests and in the quiet times around the fire when they all three ate - supplementing the rations of dried and smoked meats Cuthbert had brought along with fresh-killed Curious Shrimp, and from time to time and just for variety, a seabird Cuthbert brought down with his sling - they held palaver. Mostly it was Eddie who spoke, and mostly it was his brother he spoke of.

Cuthbert had heard only briefly of Henry Dean, during Eddie’s fractured tale of how he’d met Roland. It seemed only natural that the man would have difficulty speaking of his dead brother, but as Eddie spoke and the picture of their lives together formed more clearly in Cuthbert’s mind, he came to understand that the difficulty had as much, if not more, to do with Henry’s life than with Henry’s death.

Once the two Dean boys had had a sister, a child right between the two of them who in better circumstances would have been Eddie’s minder and companion rather than his much older brother. She’d died young, however, died tragically - run down in the street by a drunk, a thing which Cuthbert needed no understanding of  _ cars _ to grasp - and Henry Dean had found himself all a sudden expected to parent his baby brother.

Some might have risen to the challenge in such a scenario. Henry Dean had not. Henry Dean - and the boys’ mother - had made sure that Eddie never forgot, even for a moment, the sacrificial alchemy of love that took Henry’s life and potential and turned it into  _ Eddie’s _ life and left nothing for Henry except the grim weight of responsibility. And because of this, of course, because of the enormity of the sacrifice Henry had made, Eddie  _ owed him _ . 

Eddie did not put it in such terms, not exactly. He spoke, at once resentful and almost pleading, of the things Henry had given up for him. All of Henry’s time went to minding Eddie, teaching Eddie, helping Eddie, keeping Eddie safe, and so there was no time for Henry to better himself. Henry did poorly at studies because he had to help  _ Eddie _ study; Henry couldn’t practice a sport because he could not leave Eddie unattended for even a moment; Henry could not become a scholar nor distinguish himself in a trade because Eddie was always there, needing him. And so Eddie did whatever Henry wanted, went wherever Henry wanted, and regarded Henry with the wide-eyed worship of which only children are capable of, when they know the object of their worship is all that stands between them and a frightening world which they are wholly unprepared to deal with on their own.

“Once,” Eddie told them, an urgency in his voice, a fretful need to convince the two of them of Henry’s righteousness, “we went out this afternoon and lifted this car, right? That’s like - Jesus, okay, it’s a machine, right, it’s like a carriage without a horse, it makes you go real fast -”

“Thank you,” Cuthbert could not resist putting in dryly.

Eddie, too wrapped up in memories he’d like as not never truly revisited or had cause to question as an adult, didn’t notice. “Yeah, so, we found this open car with the keys still in the ignition and we lifted it, and Henry said we could drive to NYC and catch a movie, be home before Ma had any idea we’d been gone, it’d be like, you know, an adventure. And I was just being a baby-ass kid, I was all freaked out and crying and of course that pissed Henry off, but he still took us a ways out and then we saw a cop and I said the guy had seen us ‘cause, man, I just wanted to go  _ home _ , and Henry took off like a fuckin’ shot while I was still trying to figure out my fuckin’ seatbelt -” He uttered a short and humorless laugh at this. “He came back, though, like, he realized I wasn’t with him and he came back and hauled me outta the car. Slapped me a couple for cryin’, but he came back. Probably more scared than me, ‘cause if anyone caught us it was Henry gonna be hauled up in front of a judge, sixteen was plenty old to be tried for boosting a car if you were just white trash from Co-Op City, but he came back to get me, right? You see?”

Roland, who had been silent through most of this tale, looked steadily at Eddie for a long moment, and then said simply, “I think I’ll turn in.”

Truly, Eddie didn’t  _ need _ anyone to say anything. He spoke to tell himself the story, for the mind had a way of understanding things that it lived through quite differently when it heard them all laid out plain and bald and in a row, one after another. He’d come to his own conclusions about Henry.

But Cuthbert also saw that he badly  _ wanted _ someone to say something. Part of him wanted them to tell him the comfortable lies he’d been telling himself his whole life, about how his brother had been unpolished but well-meaning, how Eddie had deserved any rough treatment he got since, come on, what he got in exchange for putting up with some ribbing and shoving and brotherly tussling was  _ Henry’s whole life _ . Another part of him, a newly risen part of him that had spent a long time buried under bullshit and dope, wanted them to tell him the painful thing he knew deep down but didn’t want to admit: that Henry had been an ass. That Henry’s problems had been of his own making. That Eddie hadn’t taken anything, and that in fact Henry had done a piss-poor job as a brother.

Roland could not and would not say either of those things. It was not in him to offer false comfort, nor would he exert himself to tell Eddie what he knew Eddie already knew and was coming to believe on his own.

And so Cuthbert did what he had been doing for Roland ever since they were boys. Long before he’d understood it enough to do it on purpose, he’d known that he possessed something Roland did not, and that it was something Roland needed. What he possessed was that understanding of the minds and feelings of others, and the intuitive knowledge of what was wanted, and the desire and ability to give it.

Cuthbert recognized the weakness in Eddie that Henry had sunk his hooks into, knowing or not. Eddie needed to be  _ needed _ , and resentful as Henry might have been, he’d known that taking care of Eddie gave him a purpose - as well as an excuse for any failings - and had needed that even more surely than Eddie had needed minding. Henry had understood how to turn that back around on Eddie and make it so that Eddie believed he was the needful one, that Henry was making a sacrifice rather than taking a purpose, and thus keep Eddie chained to him with guilt and obligation long past the time he needed his hand held crossing the road.

Cuthbert, after all, was much the same, though the man to whom he’d pledged himself was neither so deliberate nor so clumsy as Henry Dean had been in his taking. Roland did not dole out scraps of love and praise, knowing that the hope of being able to earn more would tie someone to him more tightly than either cruelty or outright kindness. Roland simply gave what he could and took what he needed.

People followed Roland because of the nobility in him, the regal strength of will. People followed Roland because he had the blood of kings, and more than that, the spirit of kings. The spirit of a  _ gunslinger _ . Cuthbert had known it since he was a child. Already it was working on Eddie, but Cuthbert saw what Roland either did not see or did not care about, because it wasn’t in him to fix it: that Eddie wanted things Roland couldn’t give, and that his love was equaled by his resentment.

And because he knew that Roland needed this strange man - though he still did not know why - Cuthbert reached out to Eddie and draw him in closer.

“I see,” he said, shifting closer to Eddie in the dying firelight. That was what Eddie needed, to be seen, to be heard. That was what Cuthbert could offer, the warm glove of being known wrapped around the cold, hard hand of Roland’s honor. “I see very well, Eddie. I know something, as well.”

“Oh yeah?” Eddie asked, raw and prickly, ready to draw all his soft parts back in at the first sign of pain.

“I know that a man’s first actions say as much about his character as do his second thoughts.” He did not say that he also knew that saving someone from a disaster of your own making was hardly a rescue, nor that it would have been worse for Henry if he hadn’t. He did not say that he saw the way Eddie took his own share of the blame, though his brother had been a man’s age at the time. He did not say that it might have been better for Eddie had Henry simply kept going, for then Eddie would have known him for what he was.

He didn’t say any of those things, but when Eddie looked at him, he saw that Eddie heard them nonetheless.

\---

The next day continued in much the same vein. Eddie spoke finally of what Roland had already known, but Cuthbert had only gotten hints of: the drugs. The heroin. Which, they came to learn, was derived primarily from opium, a drug they were both well enough familiar with.

There had been some war in some far-off place - a refrain familiar enough to Roland and Cuthbert, who had grown into manhood under the grim shadow of the Good Man’s war - and Henry had been drafted as a soldier in this war. He’d suffered a wound there, and when he’d been shipped back home he’d still craved the drugs they’d given him for his pain.

The story Eddie told of when he’d first caught Henry snorting was one that Cuthbert could have told for him. There’d been a fight, and Henry - perhaps unknowing of what he did, perhaps all too aware that without Eddie around he was purposeless - had done the exact thing that ensured he’d never be asked to leave: said he would. Said that he knew he was poison, he knew he was a waste, and he’d exit Eddie’s life immediately.

So of course Eddie had kept him, and of course Eddie had gotten into the heroin as well, for a man like Henry couldn’t keep his vices to himself. Cuthbert knew the type, men who couldn’t simply drink alone in a bar, for doing it alone forced them to confront their own addiction. 

Cuthbert could have said, but didn’t, that Alain had suffered a similar injury at Jericho Hill - a bullet to the leg, a scarred and lumpen crater where once a functioning knee had been - without the benefit of any of Eddie’s world’s medical miracles. He could have said, but didn’t, that while Alain turned perhaps more often than was strictly necessary to opium and its tinctures when the pain was bad - and the pain was always bad - he had never made his own vices another man’s problem. He could have pointed out, but didn’t, that Henry’s essential problem was not a lack of opportunity nor a surfeit of pain but simply a lack of willpower and honor.

The sad tale continued in the obvious vein: as Henry slid deeper into addiction, he pulled Eddie down with him. One thing led steadily, predictably, to another, until the low point Cuthbert had heard the tale of. Finally Eddie had ended up smuggling cocaine on a flying machine, on the verge of being caught, and at that point Roland had entered his life.

It was near evening when Eddie finally finished. The tale ran out abruptly, for he’d told all he needed to tell. They walked in silence after that.

Cuthbert bit his tongue to keep from speaking. A thousand thoughts clamored to climb out his mouth and into the open air, and were he younger he might have let a few of them do just that. No weight of years could change his garrulous nature, nor the speed with which a smart comment leapt to his tongue, but long experience had tempered him enough to know when not to speak.

It was important that Eddie had time to reflect on what he’d said. Letting him lance the wound had been important as well, as had listening to the outpouring of infected matter within - though Eddie had needed little encouragement to speak, Cuthbert had made sure to drop little comments here and there that he was listening, as well as questions of Eddie’s world, which fascinated him - but with the telling done, it was time he thought about what he’d told.

“So?” Eddie asked finally, unable to wait in silence any longer. “What do you think?”

Before Roland could say whatever cold thing he was fixing to say, Cuthbert jumped in. “I think it sounds like your brother was quite a difficult man.” Which was a diplomatic way of saying  _ a complete shithead _ . He’d put Roland on his blind side, so he couldn’t see the look on the man’s face, but he knew his dinh well enough to imagine it. 

“Yeah,” Eddie said, “you got that right.” Then, in the temporizing voice that meant he was about to start making excuses, “I mean, you know, it really wasn’t his fault, he -”

“He was a man and made his own choices,” Roland interrupted. “Fault lies with him weak enough to lay blame.”

That Cuthbert recognized as a Cort saying. One that had always struck him as unfair, though he’d only ever been foolish enough to say so to Cort once. Oftentimes, Cuthbert felt, blame lay with men too stupid or stubborn to admit it, and sometimes such folk needed it pointed out to them.

“What Roland means,” he said pleasantly, “is that you ought to lay down your brother’s share of the guilt, Eddie, for a single life is burden enough.”

“What is this, some kinda fucked up Good Cop, Bad Cop routine? Nice Cowboy, Asshole Cowboy?” Eddie rounded on the both of them, scowling. “What your shithead buddy here  _ means _ is he wants me to shut up about it, right? Maybe you’re too much of a robot to give a shit about anybody, Roland, but some of the rest of us have actual feelings, okay? Sorry I didn’t get ‘em shot off in the war like you did.”

This Roland took in mostly impassively. When Cuthbert turned to glance at him, he was frowning a bit, but only that. 

“Nothing to say to that, huh? No, I guess you don’t care. All you care about is your damn Tower, right? Lucky you got some suckers around to haul you, but if you didn’t, you’d be back there crawling up the fuckin’ beach, right?”

“The Tower -” Roland began, but Eddie cut him off.

“Yeah, your buddy explained it to me - glad one of you wants to tell me anything, by the way. It’s a big damn deal, I get it. Still, I bet if Saint Peter himself came down from heaven with a signed letter saying the Tower was good and fine, you’d still be dragging us all out there, right?” This was, Cuthbert had to admit, not an untrue assessment. Eddie went on, some of the heat leaving his voice, a sort of dull resignation in its place. “And, I mean, what else have we got to do, right? I don’t know about your buddies here, but I’m a city boy from a world where fucked up lobsters don’t try to eat people, so what choice have I got but to follow you?” And, sullenly, “I still don’t know what you want with  _ me _ . I’m just some weak-ass junkie, right?”

That was precisely the question Cuthbert had been asking himself throughout Eddie’s story. Seen in a certain light, it showed a man of weak character, a man easily led, a man who needed to be needed so badly he’d follow anyone who gave it to him straight into hell. It showed a strange man who knew nothing of their world or their quest or its import.

Seen in another light, though, and taken with the story of his conduct during the time after Roland had met him, it showed a man with steel buried in him - buried deep, aye, but there nonetheless - who simply needed it dug out of the weak and clinging muck. His greatest weakness had been loyalty to a man undeserving of it, his sin being blinded to that by love, and when the cards were on the table he’d shown himself capable and willing.

Though Roland undoubtedly understood some of this, he simply shrugged and said, “It’s ka.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Eddie said truculently. “Except if you say it twice, it’s the baby word for shit.”

“I don’t know about that. It means duty, or destiny, or a place you must go. It means we’ve been drawn together for a purpose -”

“It means bullshit,” Eddie cut in. “That’s what it sounds like to me. I don’t buy all that mystical woo-woo crap, Roland. You helped me, sure, but then you kidnapped me to this fuckin’ endless nightmare beach, and you must have had some kinda reason, but damned if I can figure out what it is.”

“Ka,” said Roland again, inexorable, inflexible as ever. Like a glacier, Roland was, bearing slowly but with unstoppable weight and force down on everything in front of him. “I’m to draw three, and you’re the first. Of what use the three of you might be, I can’t say. I’m no seer, nor a scholar of history, nor a student of philosophy. All I know is that what’s done is done, and my concern is what’s ahead.”

“And  _ what is that _ ?” Eddie kicked at the sand. “There’s nothing ahead but nine billion miles of this same shitty beach, and I’m not looking to spend the rest of my life eating lobster and jerky, Roland! Where the fuck are we  _ going _ ?”

Roland pointed northward. “There, to begin with.”

Eddie squinted into the distance. He put his hand up to shield his face from the sun and looked, long and hard - because he felt the shape of Roland’s certainty, no doubt. Because he knew, in the same place inside him that the true steel laid buried, that here was a noble man to follow, a man who would bring honor back into his life. 

“Bullshit,” he said finally, but without any real heat behind it. “Pretty lousy of you to be playing tricks on me, man. I saved your life at Balazar’s.”

“I know,” Roland said, and smiled briefly. “That’s why I’ve been straight with you this whole time, Eddie. You may not see it, but I do, and I bet Cuthbert does as well, by now.”

“So I do,” Cuthbert put in. No doubt Roland had spotted it first, but Cuthbert’s own reduced vision was still plenty sharp. The door stood out plainly on the beach, a geometrically squared off shape in a curving natural landscape. That far off things got queerly flat, though he’d had a long time to adjust to that, and he knew it was farther than it looked like to him. “I expect you’ll have it in your sights yourself by sundown, Eddie.”

By sundown they did indeed all three see it. Still a few miles distant, the door was, but plain enough to all.

\---

None of them slept well that night. They got up before the sun rose and walked through the quiet darkness of the very early morning until they reached the second impossible door.

Eddie had already seen the one he’d come through, and so had Roland. The second one was still remarkable, but in a familiar kind of way. To Cuthbert, though, it was clearly incredible- he went right up and touched it, running his fingers over the heavy grey wood and dark metal knob, tracing the letters etched into the front -  **THE LADY OF SHADOWS** . He walked back and forth beside it, turning his head from side to side in a way that reminded Eddie - aided, no doubt, by his long and pointed nose - of the way pigeons inspected something new. 

It was funny right up until he went behind the door and then walked through it. The back was the nothing side, but from the front, it looked to Eddie like he passed right through the door, like a ghost or something. He emerged from the wood in a series of cross-sections, first the tip of his nose and his reaching hands and his leading foot, then the rest of his face and the front of his body, until finally he was all the way through and standing in front of them. That sort of made Eddie’s still-delicate stomach clench and tremble.

“Alain is going to be sore disappointed he missed this,” Cuthbert declared, apparently not a bit discomfited by his trip through what looked to Eddie like solid wood. “So here is where you draw the second of your three, Roland?”

“It seems so,” Roland said, looking at the door.

And suddenly Eddie couldn’t take it any longer. Behind that door lay his world, he just knew it. Maybe not New York, maybe not the eighties, but it was Earth, and he’d gladly trade trekking down this endless beach, shaking and craving and still sick to his belly half the time, for being dropped anywhere on that spinning blue dirtball. 

Worse, he knew Roland wouldn’t let him have it. Roland wanted him - for God only knew what reasons - and Roland meant to keep him right here. Roland’s buddy seemed nice enough, nicer than Roland was, anyway, but he’d known Eddie less than a week, and it was plain to see he was the same kind of hard as Roland, just better at hiding it. Between the two of them, Eddie wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting back Earthside, not without leverage.

He lunged, barely thinking about it, for Roland’s gun, the one on his bad right side. He had it, he had his fingers on the butt of it, and then a long-fingered hand clamped down tight over his wrist and he was jerked bodily away and spun around and pulled tight against Cuthbert’s skinny body, his arm yanked up painfully high behind his back.

Roland stood right where he was, looking mildly at the two of them. He didn’t seem put out by Eddie having gone for his gun. Then again, Eddie thought bitterly, the fact that his buddy now had Eddie in a hold that’d dislocate his shoulder if he wiggled too much might have something to do with that.

His own fault, he knew. He’d seen how Christing fast Roland was during the fight with Andolini and the brawl at Balazar’s afterwards - what parts of it he could remember, anyway. That he hadn’t expected the same spooky speed from Roland’s half-blind buddy was just pure stupidity.

“Let me go, man,” he said, trying to keep his voice even. 

“No,” Cuthbert said, “I don’t think I shall.” His grip was firm to the point of being painful, and he’d twisted Eddie’s arm up just as far as it would go without his shoulder coming apart, but there wasn’t any cruelty in it, or in his voice. Just firmness.

“Look,” Eddie said, and then paused, because he wasn’t sure what to say. All his thoughts jangled furiously together in his mind. All he knew was that he wanted out, and he wasn’t going to get it. “Look, man, I won’t go for the gun again. That was dumb.”

“It was indeed,” Cuthbert said. There was a hard undertone to his voice that hadn’t been there before. A taking care of business, no more Mr. Nice Guy kind of tone. Eddie suspected that if Roland didn’t need him, Cuthbert wouldn’t have bothered with grabbing and holding him; he would’ve just shoved him away and shot him down. “And I’m not stupid enough to let you try again.”

“I just want - just open the  _ door _ , man,” Eddie pleaded. He fixed his wild gaze on Roland, though he knew that was about as useful as trying to squeeze blood out of a stone. Maybe the other one would’ve taken pity, but he’d pissed that one off. “Just open the motherfucker and let me come through. That’s all I want.”

“You’re being foolish, Eddie,” Roland said mildly, as if they were having a small disagreement - about baseball, maybe, or some shit like that. “None of us has any idea where that door goes. There are infinite realities, so what chance that it opens on your world, much less a time you would have been alive?”

“I don’t give a fuck about that. I’ll be more than happy to trade the shitty seaside vacation for what’s behind Door Number Two, so just -”

“I don’t understand y -”

“I  _ know _ ,” Eddie cried, and tried to jerk away from the grip on his arm. Cuthbert pulled him right back with ease, and dragged his arm a little higher up his back as a warning against doing it again. “It doesn’t matter, just open the fuckin door!”

“I will,” Roland said, and for just a second Eddie’s heart leapt. “I’ll open it and go through to draw my second, and you’ll stay here with Cuthbert.” A shadow of a smile crossed his face. “I imagine the two of you will have much to discuss.”

And with that he turned and, without fanfare, opened the door.

All three of them stood watching, rapt. Eddie felt the grip on his wrist relax, felt the pressure and pain - not a scream, but a breath away from one - in his shoulder dip down to manageable discomfort. He could probably have torn away then, and the guy might have been distracted enough not to get him right away, and  _ Roland _ might have been distracted enough that Eddie could get one of his guns, but for the time being Eddie was as distracted as the other two.

It was his world, no doubt about that. It was New York. But it was also not  _ his _ New York, no doubt about that either. The setting flowed smoothly past as the Lady of Shadows moved, oddly comforting to Eddie. It looked like a movie. Here their intrepid heroine was trawling through a department store, looking at a jewelry display case here, picking over a stand of scarves and mufflers and fashionably warm hats there. Her hands crept into the frame, dark brown and dainty, to paw through the stand of winterwear.

“Hello, Miss Walker,” came a tentative voice from the other side of the door. The view rose and changed, dizzyingly quickly, as Our Intrepid Heroine looked up at the owner of the voice. She was a pretty young salesgirl, whose bright customer service smile wasn’t quite good enough to cover up the fact that she didn’t like the woman she was speaking to. “Can I help you today?”

Our Intrepid Heroine held up a white scarf edged in blue. “This one. Don’t bother to wrap it up, babe, just stick it in a bag.”

“Yes, ma’am. Cash or ch-”

“Cash, it’s always cash, isn’t it?”

“That’s fine, Miss Walker.”

“I’m  _ so _ glad you approve, dear.”

The look of faint distaste deepened into a little grimace, which Eddie caught just as the salesgirl turned away. Judging from how old everything looked, maybe her sense of pride was offended at having to wait on a black woman, but Eddie suspected there was another motive: Our Intrepid Heroine was clearly one rude bitch. Maybe it was a feedback loop - for all Eddie knew, the salesgirl had fired the opening salvos in a war he was only seeing the latest skirmish of - but rude was rude, and just hearing the snotty purr in the woman’s voice put his back up on the other side of the door.

Whatever the lady’s deal was, Eddie didn’t care. What he cared about was that beyond that door lay New York, and in New York he could find smack. However long ago it was, they’d had heroin, and a man like Eddie always knew how to find who was holding.

Except, even if he’d been free to move, there was one big motherfucker of a hitch, wasn’t there? He was glad that he hadn’t been allowed to get the gun, because then he might have done something even more stupid than pissing off the only guy here who seemed halfway decent.

He sagged in Cuthbert’s grip and said, disgustedly, “Let me go, man. I’m not gonna try anything.”

Roland surprised him by waving his foreshortened right hand and saying, “Go ahead. He’s realized it, I think.”

Cuthbert let him go. Eddie put his sore hand against his chest and rubbed his wrist, unsurprised to see livid red marks where Cuthbert’s fingers had dug in. Skinny the guy might be, but he was strong - Eddie had already seen that with the way he’d hauled Roland’s freight down the beach, but seeing and experiencing it up close and personal were two very different things.

“Realized what?” Cuthbert asked. He was clever - that much was obvious just from the brief talks Eddie’d had with him - but he hadn’t been there during that first meeting, had he? 

Well, Roland might like to treat people like mushrooms, but Eddie didn’t see any need to keep his new buddy in the dark and feed him shit. He turned and gave Cuthbert a tight, unhappy smile. “If I’d plugged him, it wouldn’t have done me any good. He goes through by himself, he just ends up inside the person’s mind, like he did with me. He wants to go through in his actual body, he needs me to go through with him, or it won’t work. And if I want this goddamn door to stay open and not just disappear, well, I need old long, tall, ‘n’ ugly here alive, same as he needs me. Isn’t that right?”

“I believe so, yes,” said Roland. 

“So,” said Eddie, “take me with you, man.”

“No.”

Eddie curled his hands into fists, but didn’t make a move. He was all too aware, now, of Cuthbert’s watchful eye on him, of just how fast the guy could move. “Come on. You owe me. I saved your shitty life, like, three times.”

“You did,” Roland agreed. “And you’re staying here.”

“Come  _ on _ ! I’ll come  _ back!  _ I promise I’ll come back. I owe you too, man, don’t think I don’t know that. Just let me spend a couple hours taking in the sights of home, man, let me say goodbye, alright? Let me send that part of my life off with a nice bucket of crispy homefried chicken. I never got a chance to earlier, you know.” This, Eddie thought, was a moving plea. And he did intend to come back - probably. Most likely. He  _ did _ owe Roland. Everything had just happened so fast earlier, there hadn’t been time to realize until the door was closed. Now he had a second chance, and if he wanted a little goodbye nod, well, what fucking business was it of Roland’s?

“No, Eddie,” Roland said patiently, like he was talking to a slow kid. “You don’t want chicken and you don’t want to say goodbye. You want your drug.”

“So fucking what?” Frustrated fury boiled up in Eddie, and he felt tears prick his eyes, the way they always did when he got really worked up. As a kid Henry had used to taunt him into full-on screaming tantrums and then laugh at the  _ widdle cwyin’ baaaaaby _ . That had been bad, the humiliation of knowing he was being wound up and not being able to stop, but somehow Roland’s impassive refusal was worse. Those flat, hard fucking eyes, so completely without pity or mercy or anything kind. “What d’you care if I wanna score, huh? I said I’d come back! I mean, you got my promise, Roland! You got my fuckin’  _ promise _ , so what more do you want? You want me to swear on my mom’s name, huh? I swear! You want me to swear on Henry’s name? I fuckin’  _ swear _ , I swear on my dead fuckin’ brother’s name, I’ll come back and come with you to your shitty fuckin’ Tower if you just let me go with you through that fuckin’ door!”

He subsided, panting slightly, head pounding. Roland looked at him, emotionless as a statue. “Until after the Tower,” he said finally, “that part of your life is over. Once we’ve reached it, I care not what you do with yourself.”

“Oh,” Eddie said, “you fuckin’ shitass liar. You know there ain’t gonna be no after. Not for me, not for this lady, not for whoever the third guy is, probably not for you or your fuckin’ buddies either, ‘cause brother, you look about as wasted as Henry ever fuckin’ got, and you’re leadin’ us straight into a fuckin’ deathtrap. If we don’t all die on the way there we’ll sure as shit die after, so why are you  _ lying _ to me?”

But Roland just repeated, “‘Til after the Tower, that part of your life is over.”

“It needn’t be all death and gloom,” Cuthbert spoke up. “‘Tis a grand and noble quest, Eddie, and a great honor to be invited upon it. Dangerous, yes, for all great things are, but you have it in you to be great, do you not? Even a gunslinger, perhaps. Mayhap that’s why you were drawn, and would you turn away from such an opportunity?”

Eddie rounded on him, angry enough to forget for a second how easily he’d been grabbed, how tightly he’d been held, angry enough to get up in the guy’s space. “You really believe that shit?” he snarled up into Cuthbert’s scarred face, half-laughing. “You buy into it that much, huh? I guess you’re just suckin’ Roland’s Tower-happy cock here, huh? Well let me tell you, buddy, I don’t give much of a shit about  _ honor _ , that wasn’t nothin’ we ever had much of in the fuckin’ projects. Maybe you fucks who grew up like fuckin’ royalty had that, but Eddie Dean had other shit to worry about in his life. And a gunslinger? You can shove that up your happy ass, buddy. I saw what gunslingin’ did to Henry, out in Vietnam, and I see what it did to you, with half your fuckin’ face blown off, and you and your other buddy who can’t walk livin’ in a fuckin’ cave for ten years waiting for this asshole -” he stabbed an accusatory finger towards Roland, who still stood watching - “and I don’t want it!”

“‘Tis your choice to take the opportunity for honor,” Cuthbert said, and there was some heat in his voice now, too, “but were I you, I’d rather die honorably than live as you have been. That I would, for a certainty. Sacrifice in service of a noble cause leaves a man easier of spirit than ill-gained ease.”

“What the fuck  _ ever _ ,” Eddie groaned, “you sound like you’re in a fuckin’ cult.” Which, he supposed, was sort of true - the Cult of Roland, the Cult of the Tower. He spun around again to Roland - only Roland wasn’t watching any longer. Something had changed behind them, through the door, which Roland had seen while he was yelling into Cuthbert’s face.

Our Intrepid Heroine’s hands were back in the picture, this time scooping fistfuls of cheap costume jewelry into her open bag. Roland, seeing this, had turned and run through the door, and before Eddie could say anything or try to grab him and hitch a ride on through, his living essence was gone and his unoccupied body crumpled to a heap in front of the doorway.

To Eddie, who had seen it all before, if from the other side of the door, this was nothing special. To Cuthbert, who hadn’t, it was cause for alarm.

He rushed past Eddie and dropped to his knees beside Roland’s unconscious body, the conflict forgotten. He did what he could to straighten out the crumpled way Roland’s body had fallen, and brushed sand off his face, while stealing peeks up through the open doorway.

It was, Eddie had to admit, a hell of a show. The woman had frozen when Roland entered her mind - like maybe she was fighting him, or they were just having a nice little discussion over some mental cups of tea and tiny sandwiches, who the fuck knew - with one hand clutching a handful of cheap jewelry, half in her bag and half out. Then she’d started screaming, and of course people had looked around to see why some lady was hollering her head off in the fuckin’ Macy’s, and she’d been caught in the act.

Now Roland was hauling ass, probably away from a pursuing security guard looking to bust the shoplifting bitch. Eddie saw the dressing rooms approaching at breakneck speed and knew he only had a handful of seconds in which to act.

Two gunslingers was two gunslingers too many to deal with, Eddie knew that. Generally nice guy or not, it was only expected that Cuthbert would be on Roland’s side; he supposed if he’d seen somebody try to shoot  _ his _ buddy, he’d probably not feel too kindly towards that person either. One gunslinger, though - one gunslinger who was still woozy and weak and raspy from his illness, who had staggered back from death’s door but still looked like absolute shit, who might still be getting sicker because a week’s worth of Keflex might not have knocked out the hellacious infection raging inside of him, one gunslinger down his dominant hand and disoriented from the trip between minds - well, those were odds Eddie liked a lot better.

Right beside Eddie’s foot was a rock, half buried in the sand. He bent and snatched it up, hefting the smooth weight of it. It was a sort of irregular oblong, like someone had pasted half an egg onto the top of a pyramid. Gripping it by the smooth, rounded side, he took two quick steps up behind Cuthbert, and raised it above his head. Hopefully he wouldn’t kill the guy - Eddie liked him, he did - but he needed to talk to Roland mano a mano, as it were, and if he did, well, he didn’t think the door was tied to  _ this _ guy.

\---

Cuthbert heard the crunch of Eddie’s footsteps on the sand. That the man was planning something, he had no doubt, and a part of him admired the tenacity - not to mention the audacity - even while the rest of him went on telling his body to tense and pivot and ready one of those hands for shooting, because he might be a kindly fellow, but he wasn’t stupid enough to let a man get away with trying to kill him or his dinh  _ twice _ .

There was a brief, dizzying second where the woman in the wheeled chair came through and he saw what Eddie had seen when he himself walked through the door from the nothing side. At one moment she was on the other side of the magical portal, and then bit by bit she came through into their world, until she was sitting in her chair on the sand. She was in the chair, he saw, because both of her legs ended abruptly a little more than halfway down the thighs.

“What,” she asked pleasantly, “are you planning to do with that rock, young man?”

Cuthbert twisted around and beheld Eddie standing over him, the stone he’d been intending to brain him with still upraised - a vicious sharp thing it looked, too, and heavy, for Eddie’s skinny arms were trembling with the strain of holding it aloft. A blow from that thing would have put him out for a long time, if not forever, and like as not he’d have woken up with half his brains run right out of his ear.

“Yes,” asked Roland beside him, “what  _ are _ you planning to do with it, Eddie?”

Probably, Cuthbert could have avoided the blow. Certainly he could have avoided taking it head on, and rather than smashing in his skull, it might simply drive his shoulder from the socket or shatter his collarbone or break his jaw and send half his teeth down his throat. That he and Roland could both do for Eddie at that point he didn’t doubt, but he wasn’t eager to be any more crippled than he already was, and a man as desperate as Eddie clearly was could do a lot of damage before he went down… and even more than the imperative of self-defense was the simple fact that Roland wanted him.  _ Needed _ him, in some manner.

He made no move. Neither did Roland, except to sit up. They both looked up at Eddie, who under the combined weight of their gazes - and the curious gaze of the woman who Roland had drawn - quailed, and then tossed the rock aside, looking disgusted.

“Nothing,” he bit out sulkily. “Fuckin’ nothing.”

The Lady turned her head and started to ask, “I wonder if you could please explain where you’ve taken m-” and then stopped, because although her head surely knew that if she had moved without having done it herself, someone must have moved her, her eyes saw that there was no one standing behind her.

She looked back at the three of them, now, her dark eyes more frightened than curious, her gaze bouncing between them and never quite settling anywhere. “Where am I?” she asked, and as she continued speaking, the volume of her voice grew as did the alarm in it. “Who pushed me? How can I be here? How can I be dressed, for that matter, when I was home watching the twelve o’ clock news in my robe? Who am I? Where is this? Who are you?”

Cuthbert glanced sharply at Roland, who returned him the barest hint of a nod.  _ Who am I? _ the woman had asked, before she’d even asked who  _ they _ were. And it seemed, perhaps, an appropriate question, because Cuthbert could remember the face of the woman as Roland wheeled her body towards the door - a face contorted with fury, the face of a woman fighting the whole way, even though she was losing. The pleasant-voiced, frightened woman before them was nothing like what he would have expected of the mind behind that snarling face.

“How come she doesn’t know?” Eddie asked, sounding distantly fascinated. 

“I can’t say,” Roland said, shrugging. He climbed to his feet, briskly dusted the sand off the seat of his pants, and then offered Cuthbert a hand - first his mangled right, which he returned to his side with an impatient little jerk, and then his good left. “Shock, I suppose.”

“Shock took her all the way back to her living room, before she left for Macy’s?” Now Eddie’s tone took on a hint of scorn, although it was still distant, as if he were discussing something seen on the other side of the street in town and not a woman sitting a few feet away from them, her frightened eyes still moving from one to the next of the three men she’d found herself with, like a butterfly in a field of flowers. “You tellin’ me the last thing she remembers is sitting in her bathrobe and listenin’ to some blow-dried dude talk about how they found that gonzo down in the Florida Keys with Christa McAuliffe’s left hand mounted on his den wall next to his prized marlin?”

Dazed and faint, the Lady asked, “Who is Christa McAuliffe? Is she one of the missing Freedom Riders?”

Shock might have erased most of one’s day - Cuthbert had experienced moments like that, where he’d suddenly found himself standing dumbly in the middle of a moment with no idea how he’d gotten there, the whole world gone faint and wavery as if behind a pane of dirty glass - but it surely did not make one forget one’s own  _ self _ . And being dragged from one’s own world might be a hell of a shock, but he didn’t judge it severe enough to produce that sort of amnesia.

Something else was at play - and from the look on Roland’s face, in-drawn and considering, he might have an idea - but that the woman was teetering on the edge of breaking down was plain enough. Cuthbert went to her, dropping to one knee in the sand so as not to loom over her.

“You’re safe, my lady,” he told her, for surely a woman finding herself alone in the company of three rough men would want to hear that, crippled or otherwise. He took her hand, enfolding it in both of his, a warm and human touch to reinforce his words.

She glanced down at him and attempted a brief, tremulous smile, then went back to her restless sweeping looks, from him to Roland to Eddie to the wide empty horizon and back. “Won’t somebody please explain where I am, though, and how I got here?”

“Well,” Cuthbert started to say, but at the same time Eddie spoke up.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Dorothy,” Eddie said. “You ain’t in Kansas anymore.”

Cuthbert shot him a look - thinking as he did that he had an idea now of how Roland felt when he couldn’t still his own foolish tongue - though there wasn’t much heat in it. Perhaps Eddie intended it to be reassuring, a moment of humor to lighten the stress. More like, Cuthbert suspected that - like himself - Eddie was the sort of man who ran off at the mouth when he was distressed, and that joking came as naturally to him in such situations as losing one’s temper did to other men.

Either way, all it did was make the woman lose what tenuous grip she’d had on her emotions. Tears filled her eyes, then spilled over, and she began to sob, putting her free hand up over her face and hunching inwards in her chair. The hand Cuthbert held squeezed at his fingers, and he squeezed her back.

Eddie, clearly taken aback by this and at the very end of his own frayed rope, began shouting at Roland. “Tell her! Tell her, you kidnapping fuck! You’re the one who brought her here, so you fucking tell her!”

Roland did not. Roland went on staring into the distance, that dreamy expression on his face, mulling something over in that slow but relentless way he had. It might take a moment for Eddie’s question to penetrate, and longer for Roland’s mind to tie off its current train of thought and come up with a response.

Eddie, not familiar enough with the workings of Roland’s mind to know this, didn’t give him that time. “Fuck you,” he said, disgusted, “you’re nothing but a goddamn machine, aren’t you?”

He went to join Cuthbert beside the lady. He crouched and put an arm around her shoulder, and she wrapped her free arm around his middle, clutching him close to her, squeezing Cuthbert’s fingers bruisingly tight. No doubt she was holding onto Eddie with similar panicked force, but neither of them said anything about it.

“It’s okay,” Eddie told her as soothingly as he could manage. “I mean, it’s not great, but it’s okay.”

“Where  _ are _ we?” the woman wailed, voice clotted and tearful. “I was sitting at home watching TV so I could see if my friends got out of Oxford alive and now I’m here and  _ I don’t even know where here is!”  _ The pitch of her sobbing - previously the restrained sort of hitching snuffle of a dignified woman who, though badly frightened, had still enough presence of mind not to want to cry in front of strangers - rose to an almost hysterical level.

Eddie gave her shoulder a squeeze and rocked a little, moving her as well. “Well, I don’t know, really, but I’m from the same place you are, good ol’ New York, and I went through pretty much the same thing. You just kinda gotta adjust, is all.”

“You’re on the beach of the great Western Sea,” Cuthbert said, pitching his voice to a smooth and reassuring register. “Beyond yonder mountains lies the Mohaine Desert, and though I know it looks a dreadful empty place, why, up the beach but a little way, I have a cozy home and folk waiting there for you to meet.”  _ Folk _ was perhaps overstating it, but overstate it he did. None of it meant anything to her, he knew, but he hoped that hearing someone state something with assurance would help calm her somewhat. It was the sheer weight of the unknown that was truly frightening, not simply the dislocation. Being in a new place was something a person could bear, even when it happened so suddenly and unexpectedly. Being in  _ no _ place, however -

He and Eddie went on soothing her, and gradually her crying wound down and she went quiet, though her eyes were still dark and frightened, sitting in puffy, bruised hollows in her face. It would take some time, he judged, for her to truly adjust to her new circumstances.

Once she had calmed down, Cuthbert took his leave of her. Let Eddie offer her the comfort of familiarity; he needed to speak with his dinh.

“You look as though you have something on your mind,” he said softly, standing beside Roland and watching the two otherworld folks comfort each other. 

“Yes,” Roland said slowly. His eyes were fixed now on Eddie and the woman as well. “Many things. When I was in her mind - oh, I wish I had been able to tarry a moment longer. I would understand much better. I think I understand enough, though.”

“Aye? And what is it that you understand?” Though there was no doubt he was the cleverer of the two - ever had been, even as a boy - Cuthbert had a great respect for Roland’s understanding. Roland thought slowly, but methodically and well, and his careful consideration often turned up things that Cuthbert in his quickness either missed or dismissed.

“You saw the way she changed.” It was not a question. “I felt it, inside. When I went into her, she was like -” here he paused, looking thoughtfully into the distance. He was a very literal man, Roland was, sometimes painfully so. Abstract description was difficult for him, if not often beyond him. “If you could take all of the - the  _ badness _ inside of a person, the anger and resentment and petty cruelties, and make them into their own person, that is what she felt like. And then, at the very last moment, she changed. And now -” he swept his hand out towards the woman sitting before them wordlessly.

The woman who was with them now was gentle and polite, almost ridiculously so. Even in the extremity of her fear at finding herself thrust into a new, unknown place, there had been no meanness in her, no defensive flashing anger. Nothing, in fact, of the woman Roland had described.

“So you think she is perhaps two women?” Cuthbert asked. “That her mind has divided her into two halves?” 

“Something like that,” Roland agreed. “This one seems to have no harm in her, but the other one is dangerous. Be on your lookout, for I don’t think Eddie will.”

That assessment, Cuthbert agreed with. Already, Eddie looked at the woman with big, moony calf’s eyes. Not so surprising, perhaps, that after weeks of only Roland’s company, he would be so drawn to a woman from his own world, but concerning. His care for her was good - such care was a thing Roland lacked, had ever lacked, if not in the feeling of it then in being able to express it any manner but clumsily, and the older he’d grown the colder he’d become - but it might well blind him to her faults.

“Come,” Cuthbert said, “let us go and you explain to your newest conscript for what reason she’s found herself here. Perhaps she’ll stay pleasant for us.” He didn’t much think so, though. From the look on Roland’s face, he didn’t either.

“You do,” Roland said, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “For you’ve ever been better at putting folk at their ease than I.”

“I’ve ever been better at making your own words sound sweeter than you mean them, you mean,” Cuthbert said dryly, but with no hint of negative feeling. They both knew it was true, and he knew that his position at Roland’s side was a great honor and a great trust. “And what shall you do while I go communicate your plans?”

“Fetch water, I believe.”  _ Wander off tactfully out of earshot _ was what he meant, though it was not an unnecessary chore. Cuthbert’s supplies weren’t depleted, but they did need frequent refilling. Mostly he and Eddie had been taking turns doing it, in deference to Roland’s weakened state, but it wouldn’t look amiss for Roland to go off to do it now.

Roland did that, and Cuthbert sauntered casually over to the two otherworld folks, now sitting and chatting amiably enough. When he got close enough, he saw that the woman was being very pleasantly stubborn with Eddie.

“-of this is real,” she said. “I may have sustained a head injury. They are notorious swingers of axe-handles and billy clubs in Oxford Town.”

“You’re trying to tell me,” Eddie asked, “that you think this is all some sort of dream you’re having while you’re unconscious?”

“Or in a coma,” she added primly, and then, seeing the look Eddie gave her, “and you needn’t look at me it’s so ridiculous. Look here.” She carefully parted her cap of tight curls on the left, disclosing an ugly old wound, one that the surrounding hair had been carefully moved about to cover. “I was in a coma for three weeks as a child. I dreamed a lot. I can’t remember what they were, but my mamma told me later that she said she knew I’d live if I just kept talking, and apparently I kept talking all the time. I  _ do  _ remember that the dreams were very vivid.” She looked around, taking in Eddie and the beach and Cuthbert, standing quietly beside her and listening. “At least as vivid as this and the two of you. And  _ him _ .” 

“How’d that happen?” Eddie asked.    


Cuthbert remained quiet and kept listening, for he was curious as well.  _ As a child _ , she’d said, so either it had been the sort of accident to which children seemed drawn, or an especial cruelty. That she’d survived such an injury at such a tender age was incredible to him, although he remembered Eddie speaking of how the doctors of his world had recreated his brother’s ruined knee, and thought that perhaps such a thing was common in a world of such miracles.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said at first. “I’m just trying to point out that what happened once might happen again.” Eddie was insistent, though, and when Cuthbert spoke up to say that he was curious as well, she relented and went on with the story. “I was struck by a falling brick. We went to Elizabeth, in New Jersey. Our first trip north. We went in the Jim Crow car -”

“Wait, isn’t that, like, the guy from Dumbo?” asked Eddie.

The woman gave him a withering look. “Is that supposed to be funny, young man?”

Eddie - who had quite likely been making some reference he did find amusing, going by the smile dying off his face - raised his hands defensively. “No, I just don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m from a different time, okay? You’re from, what, the sixties, right? I was born in ‘64. It was 1987 when Roland took me.”

The woman stared at him for a long time, then said, “Well. That certainly adds to your argument that this is reality.”

“Well, I’m from a different world entirely,” Cuthbert put in, “and possibly a hallucination to boot, so perhaps I have more of an excuse for ignorance than Eddie. What is this car of which you speak, sai?”

She startled a little, as if she had stopped noticing him. Quite possible; he was a mouthy fellow, but he had a gunslinger’s talent for standing still and silent when he wanted, and he hadn’t wanted to interrupt her talk with Eddie overmuch. “My name is Odetta,” she said. “And who - I’m sorry, this has all been terribly shocking, and I don’t believe I’ve caught your name?”

He made a leg and bowed to her, putting his hands out with a courtly flourish. “Cuthbert Allgood, son of Robert, at your service, dear lady.” And with his manners made and his pleasantries done, he dropped down to sit cross-legged beside Eddie, looking up at her with his chin propped on his interlaced hands.

“Cuthbert,” she repeated, bemused. “That sounds very Arthurian. Why, I do believe there was a poem -” She put a hand to her head, massaging at her temple, then lowered it and shrugged. “I’m sorry, I don’t recall. I must have read it in school, but all of that seems very far away just now.”

“Understandable,” Cuthbert said, “for you have had a great shock indeed. But continue on with your tale, please, for I’d hear it as well.”

“Well - the Jim Crow car was where the Negroes had to sit.” She peered at both of them with squinting eyes, as if suspecting a joke. “So we wouldn’t offend the white folks, of course. We had to ride up in a whole separate car. That’s what the Freedom Riders rode to end, of course, that whole stupid segregation business.”

“Ohh,” Eddie said, as if Odetta’s words made perfect sense. “Oh, okay, yeah, you’re from before segregation was over. Jeez.”

“It worked?” Odetta leaned forward in her chair, eyes fixed on him, glittering. “You say you’re from another time, and I still don’t know that I believe that, but - if your time is real - it worked? It’s over?”

“Well, yeah.” Eddie shrugged. “I mean, I guess it’s not perfect, I don’t know. Black people can live in the same places and drink out of the same fountains and don’t have to ride in the back of the bus or anything anymore.”

“That’s a trifle rude, don’t you think?” she asked, voice suddenly frosty. “Calling Negroes  _ blacks _ .”

“Hey,” Eddie said, raising his hands defensively, “when I was growing up, saying that would get you an ass-kicking, and one you deserved. It’s basically like the other n-word.”

“Is that the word for the tribe you hail from, Odetta?” Cuthbert asked, mulling this over. “One oppressed in the place from which you come?”

“Well,” Odetta hemmed, “sort of. I mean, it isn’t really a  _ tribe _ \- it’s, you know, people of African descent in America, people who are descendants of the slaves - I guess if this is a whole different world, you maybe don’t have an Africa. Or slavery.”

“Of this Africa, I have not heard,” Cuthbert admitted, “though the world is quite a large place. Slavery, we do have. Any civilized folk know it for the barbarous practice it is. Does not the Good Book itself say that the man who builds his house from unrighteousness and his upper rooms by injustice, who makes his neighbor work for him and does not give him wages, shall be visited with woe for his sins? It surely does. Although,” he added, somewhat gloomily, “civilization is in short supply, as the world has moved on.”

“Oh, what,” Eddie asked, eyebrows raised, “you don’t have racism in medieval cowboy times?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Eddie.”

“Oh, come  _ on _ .” Now he sounded almost disgusted. “You know, like, hating on people for what race they are. How they look. You’re not gonna tell me that you just got rid of all that shit in the cowboy apocalypse, man, I am just not buying that shit.”

Odetta didn’t say anything, but her gaze was fixed intently on Cuthbert, her eyes full of a mixture of some nameless emotion - hope, perhaps, and scorn, and worry.

Cuthbert shrugged. “Hatred springs from many sources, Eddie, and folk ever find reasons to hate those who are strange to them. People do look all sorts of ways all over, though. It matters more where one is from, I suppose, and how one was raised, and how one speaks, than what one looks like. I’ve known folk a-plenty who looked like you, Odetta, in Gilead and otherwise.”

The way she looked put him in mind of Jamie DeCurry’s mother - not Jamie himself, quite, for he’d been lighter of skin and somewhat sharper in his features. His father had been what Cuthbert supposed she would call a white man - pale-skinned and light-haired, with the same grey eyes as Jamie - but his mother and all her family had been richly brown, with the same sort of tightly curled hair and broad, rounded features as Odetta. They’d hailed from a southern seacoast Barony, where most folk looked so.

“Well,” Odetta said after a time. “That is exactly what we’re trying to change in Oxford Town, you know. It makes sense if I took a head wound, I’d dream up a world where that sort of discrimination, at least, isn’t happening anymore.”

“Yeah, when Roland comes back we’re gonna all link arms and sing Kumbayah,” Eddie said. “This is all beside the point, though. You were telling us about your brick.”

“Right… Well… We rode up north to attend my Aunt Blue’s wedding - really she was my Aunt Sophia, but she fancied the color blue, or as my mother said, she fancied fancying it, so I grew up calling her Aunt Blue. I was only five at the time. I don’t remember the wedding so well, but I remember the reception afterwards, and all the presents…” Her voice took on a dreamy tone. “Presents are always so wonderful to a child, aren’t they?”

Eddie and Cuthbert both agreed as they were.

“Anyway, at that time my father was getting ahead - that was what my mother had told me to say when a girl I played with asked if my daddy was rich. She said to say that we were  _ getting ahead _ . So they’d bought my Aunt Blue a lovely china set, and I remember…” Her voice faltered, and she raised her hand to her head to rub her temple again, this time frowning a bit as if she were beginning to develop a headache.

“I remember,” she continued after a moment, dreamily, “that she gave my Aunt Blue a  _ forspecial _ …”

“A what?” Eddie interrupted to ask.

Odetta squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, fingers rubbing, rubbing at her temple. “A special plate. I’m sorry, I’ve got a headache, and it’s got me tangling my words up. My mother bought my aunt a special plate, this lovely white plate with a delicate blue webbing around the edge, and when she gave it to Aunt Blue she cried and cried over it… I think they must have seen something like that growing up, but of course in those days they would never have been able to afford it… And now that my father was  _ getting ahead _ , they could give my Aunt Blue something  _ forspecial _ .”

Odetta smiled, but it had a strained look to it. There was a shadow in her dark eyes, behind the look of remembrance, as if she were on the very edge of recalling something unpleasant - perhaps getting a snatch of it, a whiff of an old scent, the ear’s memory of some jumbled speech that made not a lick of sense but nonetheless called up some old feeling.

“After that, my aunt and her husband left for the Great Smokies on their honeymoon. On the train, in the Jim Crow car. We walked home… that’s when the brick hit me, after the wedding, so at least I didn’t spoil it. My parents had called a taxi, but when he showed up and saw us he drove off like his hair was on fire and his ass was catching. So my father said we might as well walk, and my mother agreed just as fast as lickedy-split, for it wasn’t but a mile and it was a fine day. I was walking on the inside, away from the traffic, and I remember thinking about my daddy saying he couldn’t wait to see my face light up when the clock chimed in Central Park and all the animals came out to dance, and wondering if he meant I would start to glow and if it would be uncomfortable, and then the brick hit me. And then the dreams started, vivid dreams just like this one.”

“Did the brick just fall,” Eddie asked, “or did someone bomb you?”

“Oh, they never found anyone. The police went up there and found the place it had fallen from, but there were plenty of loose and missing bricks up there. It was just outside the window of a fourth-floor room of a condemned apartment building. No one was supposed to be in there, but of course, plenty of people were, especially at night.”

“Sure,” Eddie said agreeably.

“So the police ruled it an accident,” Odetta went on, “and my mother agreed it probably had been, though I think she was lying. I think after the incident with the cab driver, she thought someone had been waiting up there… That it was a racially charged sort of thing, a crime of opportunity perhaps. But they never found anyone.” She was quiet a moment, and then asked, “Will your lobster creatures come out soon?”

“The Curious Shrimp are strictly nocturnal,” Cuthbert assured her. “We’ve some hours yet.”

“So you said you had two ideas,” Eddie said. “One is that you’re having a coma-dream, like you did before, because someone bopped you with a billy-club in Oxford Town.” He said it just the same way Odetta had said it, in a lilting, almost lyrical way. “What’s the other one?”

“The other one,” Odetta said, “is that I may have gone insane.”

“You seem quite sane to me,” Cuthbert put in, which wasn’t exactly true, was it? Not going by what Roland had said, nor by what he himself had seen. She didn’t seem to be speaking of her own dual nature, though, but simply of the idea that she was experiencing an elaborate hallucination. “Very lucid and all that.”

“Well, thank you, but that’s just what a hallucination would say, isn’t it?”

“Well, fair lady, if ‘tis all a dream, why not play along then?” Cuthbert asked back. “One doesn’t often know one is in a dream while it’s still going on, is’t not true? One simply goes along, and everything that upon waking is bizarre seems perfectly normal at the time. So you see, the very fact of your doubt calls into doubt your assertion that all this is simply a dream you’re having as a result of having taken a wound or gone mad.”

“Well…” Her hand was back at her temple, rubbing. She frowned doubtfully down at him. “It could be a  _ lucid _ dream.”

“Oh, aye,” Cuthbert agreed readily, returning her frown with a grin. “It could be indeed! How to find the back door in one’s dreams and awake when needed, or guide them for understanding, is something we were taught. I’ve never been as good at it as Alain, I will admit, but I know a trick or two. In such dreams, one can control what happens, can one not?

Sensing that she’d stepped into the trap, Odetta frowned even more deeply at him. “Yes, I suppose so. I’ve never had one before, but everyone does say that.”

Cuthbert took his chin off his hands, threw his arms out wide, and let the trap snap shut. “So change something, sai! Grow yourself a new pair of legs, perhaps, or pretty my face back up, or make all of us naked. Fly us all to an inn with a bathhouse staffed with lovely lady attendants to oil and massage us. Take us to your New York, why not? Or -”

“ _ Stop _ ,” Odetta snapped, her eyes squeezed so tightly shut they were slits, her fingertips digging into the skin of her left temple. “Just stop it, alright? I can’t do that. Just because I can’t do that doesn’t mean this is happening - it’s a hallucination, then, because I’ve gone insane. This simply can _ not _ be real, and nothing you say is going to convince me of it!”

Her words rang with the conviction of truth. She wouldn’t even look at him, and he knew better than to push her further. 

“Well,” Cuthbert said after a moment of silence, “I believe I see Roland returning with our freshly filled skins.” He climbed to his feet, then made a show of stretching and brushing the sand off his seat. “We shall hold a palaver of imaginary men amongst ourselves, I believe. Perhaps you will have better luck convincing her, Eddie.”

“Hey, man -” Eddie started to say, but Cuthbert left him sitting there with the woman with a cheery sort of mercilessness. Like as not he’d have no more luck than Cuthbert - who considered himself to be well skilled in the art of argument - had, but if anyone could convince her, it would more likely be a man from her own world than a figment of the one she believed to be imaginary.

And besides, he liked what he saw of Roland already not one bit. The man wasn’t staggering, but he walked in a slow, stumping way that wasn’t far from it, and even from this far Cuthbert could see that he was drawn and wan.

“You look unwell,” Cuthbert greeted him with, once he was within Roland’s earshot and hopefully out of Eddie’s and Odetta’s. “Are you sickening again, do you think, or have you simply overstrained yourself?”

“I’m sickening again, I think,” Roland said simply. He did not bother to refute the fact of his illness. Up close, he looked even worse; his face was pale save for two blooming fever-spots on his cheeks, and his eyes had sunk once more into the hollows of his sockets and looked out, exhausted and glittering, from bruised and puffy flesh. “Eddie did say the medicine might not be enough. I will want to speak to him of it, I think, but later.” He looked over Cuthbert’s shoulder at Eddie and Odetta, a silent question on his face.

“It hasn’t gone so well,” Cuthbert said. “She believes she is dreaming or perhaps has gone mad, and became quite cross with me when I suggested otherwise.”

The ghost of a smile crossed Roland’s lips. “When you harangued her about it, I have no doubt. I know how you suggest.”

Wounded, Cuthbert put a hand to his chest. “I simply made a series of logical points, my friend, which she did not wish to hear. When this became clear, why, I left her to what comfort she may receive from her world-companion. The very soul of tact, I am. Did not you say so yourself, but a few minutes ago?”

“I don’t believe those were my words, no.” A wrinkle marred Roland’s brow as he looked at the two otherworlders. “She must come around soon.”

“Oh,” Cuthbert said, taking one of the full skins from Roland and tying it around himself, “I’ve no doubt she will. Give her time.”

“I don’t have much to give,” Roland said, and walked back to the others.

Eddie got up and came to meet them as they walked his way, frustration evident in every line of him. “You look like shit,” he greeted Roland.

“Aye, I told him much the same,” Cuthbert said cheerfully. “Had you any better luck with the lady?”

“No,” Eddie said, “she’s one stubborn broad.”

“Two,” Roland said.

“What?”

“She’s two women,” he explained patiently. “I felt this when I was inside of her. How such a thing can be, I do not know, but you must listen closely and understand, Eddie.” 

Roland reached out and curled his left hand around Eddie’s upper arm, drawing him in close and peering into his face. Feverish or not, those pale blue eyes were as hard and impossible to squirm away from as ever, and well did Cuthbert know how it felt to be pinned by that gaze. “Do you hear me, Eddie? Hear me very well?”

 

“Yeah, man,” Eddie said nervously, reaching up as if to pluck Roland’s hand away. His own hand dropped long before it touched Roland’s. “Yeah, I hear you.”

“This woman Odetta may be stubborn, but she means us no harm. Be as fond of her as you wish. The  _ other _ , however, is dangerous, and because of this, you cannot let down your guard. Not around either of them. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, I - yeah, man, I get you.” When Roland finally let him go, Eddie rubbed fitfully at the place he had grasped, eyes wide and bewildered. “I don’t get it either, but I hear what you’re saying.”

And maybe he did, but Cuthbert saw as well as Roland did that he didn’t truly  _ believe _ it. Not all the way, at any rate, not back in the part of his brain where survival lived. That was part of his softness. 

A life of relative luxury - maybe not in his own mind, nor in the minds of the grass-eaters of his world, but to Cuthbert, who had been raised to the gun as a boy and cast out from his destroyed home barely into manhood, the life Eddie had led was soft beyond imagining - hadn’t ruined the steel at the core of him, but rather buried it in useless slag rock which must be chipped and chiseled and broken away

He was in for a sharp lesson, Cuthbert suspected. Hopefully the learning of it wouldn’t hurt him too badly, or get any of them killed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many of Stephen King's works, especially his older ones, showcase attitudes that are so consistent throughout and so baked into the narrative itself that I have to assume they, to some degree, reflect the author's own beliefs and ideas. I do not agree with or like many of them. I also realize that these stories are a product of their time.
> 
> When Drawing of the Three was published, I do not doubt that a bestselling author writing a story wherein a multiply disabled black woman who was an educated heiress as well as a staunch civil rights activist falls in love with and marries a white man, as well as performs various feats of physical badassery as a gunslinger, was a fairly bold move. (It was 1987, so, I mean, not exactly the dark ages of segregation, but it was definitely in many respects A Different Time.) I have no doubt that Stephen King thinks racism sucks, white supremacists are dickheads, and that black people ought to be allowed to be part of society.
> 
> At the same time, he writes about these issues with all the grace and subtlety of a sledgehammer, or, perhaps, more appropriately, a left-leaning white college student who really earnestly wants everyone to know he thinks Racism Is Bad but is not, actually, entirely sure of what racism is aside from shit like "putting on a white hood and burning crosses in people's yards." Which is a roundabout way of saying that the entire handling of Odetta/Detta is, actually, profoundly and uncomfortably racist, despite his obvious intentions to the contrary.
> 
> Similarly, the idea - both implicit in the way the narrative discusses things and explicitly stated on a couple of occasions - that there aren't really brown people in Allworld aside from one specific far-off and exotic country where all the brown people live is pretty silly. Nothing about this story is particularly 'historical', but that's just not how societies work. People travel. People intermingle. People are born looking a variety of ways. The quasi-medieval aspects of Gilead lend themselves to an understanding of race that has much more to do with nationality and shared culture and language than our current understanding of ethnicity, which is an incredibly recent invention. There's a lot of fascinating research that has been done on the topic!
> 
> The long and the short of it, though, is that I imagine a fairly different Gilead than Stephen King seems to have been doing when he wrote these books. I have certain ways that I picture certain characters and some of those characters are not white. I'm not necessarily trying to make any sort of a point with that other than "people who aren't white also exist." I did not sit down and pull from a list of Minority Characteristics or whatever it is that reactionary type folks think happens in these cases, I just had certain images form of certain characters while I was writing and reading, and when I sat down to imagine Gilead - since we are given only sparse details from Mr. King himself - I drew on what I personally know about the various time periods it's based in, including the quasi-medieval period as well as the cowboy time period. 
> 
> Anyway, I felt that this was both a large enough departure from the source material and a serious enough meta-narrative issue that I wanted to say something. Call it a different level of the Tower if you want. Call it an au fanfic made by someone writing in the year 2019, not the 1980s. Stop reading if you feel like it's too political (Stephen King made several very blatant political choices and insinuations and references in his original work here, too, which I imagine turned some people off.) Keep reading if you want to see where it goes from here. 
> 
> See you next chapter!


	5. Chapter 5

In the middle of the night, with the moon risen halfway up the sky, Detta Walker woke up. Her eyes opened, full of starlight and clear intelligence.

She remembered the past evening and afternoon very well. How they’d dragged her into this strange world, how they’d tried to hurt her, how they’d tied her to her chair when she fought them: she remembered it all.

One of them was a white boy. The other two looked like Indians to her, the ugly old hardass one and the pretty-boy younger one, and she wouldn’t have thought they’d like the white man any more than she did, but maybe when it came to that other thing men liked it didn’t much matter what company they were keeping.

It was the baby-ass white boy told them to watch, he’d show them what you did with uppity, mouthy bitches like her where he came from. He was the one who’d killed and cooked one of those monsters that came crawling out the sea and then waved the meat in her face, grinning and telling her to bite for it like the ugly dog she was.

It was the pretty-boy, though, who pulled the haunch of beef from his pack and roasted it over the fire. The smell of roasting meat had been seductive, almost torturous, but she hadn’t reacted, even when the white boy and the pretty-boy came over to hold the meat just out of her reach and tell her to bite for it.

The pretty-boy had made her another offer - suck on his sausage a little and he’d give her the real meat - and she’d told him that with a face like his, even  _ with _ a big-ass hole blown in it, he didn’t need to go around raping unless he had an itty-bitty little nasty pencil dick. Then she’d spat at them. 

They’d hit her around a little. Men always talked with their fists when they were mad, and she’d made these ones plenty mad. The pretty-boy laughed while he did it, laughed and grinned at her like a desert jackal. Then the Really Bad Man - she knew just from looking at him that he was a professional hardcase - called them both back, and they’d left her to smell their dinner and starve. Fine by her.

Now, though, she wasn’t tied to her chair but laid on top of one blanket and under another one. The baby-ass white boy was asleep, and so was the Really Bad Man, Mr. Big Ugly himself. 

The pretty-boy was standing a watch, but out some way, and with his back to them. And he only had but the one eye, anyway. Detta wasn’t worried about him, no sir.

She turned over on her belly, the soft scraping sound of the sand moving beneath her swallowed up by the lonely whistle of the wind and the thundering gurgle of the tide, and began to move. As she moved, she kept an eye on the pretty-boy jackal, because if he turned around and saw her getting up to mischief, might be he’d give her a taste of his skinny, crooked little sausage to teach her.

She had an idea the Really Bad Man wanted her first, but the pretty-boy jackal looked like the type who’d take it if he thought he could get away with it. Probably his dick was as skinny as the rest of him and she wouldn’t feel anything but the hot little squirt at the end anyway, but it was the principle of the thing.

Laid down at the baby-ass white boy’s side were the Really Bad Man’s gunbelts. It was those Detta crawled for. If she could get her hands on those, it would even the playing field up more than a bit.

She reached them without incident and lifted one of the guns out carefully. It was a huge and deadly weight in her hand, the ancient grip smooth and cool. It felt perfectly right there, a perfect killing engine.

A little farther, crawling awkwardly now with the gun cradled against her chest, and she was beside the white boy. He slept like a rock, arrogantly sure of his safety, of his  _ superiority _ . 

The Really Bad Man, though, stirred a bit in his sleep. Detta froze, lips drawn back in a snarl, until he quietened down again.

_ Check _ , she told herself.  _ That Really Bad Man’s one sneaky sumbitch, so you check, Detta, you be sure.  _ He worried her more than the other two put together. She held still, waiting in absolute silence to see if he stirred, to see if she could catch a glimpse of moonlight reflecting off his eyes, if maybe they were open just a slit. After a long time, she was assured that he was truly asleep, and she went on with her business.

The gun turned out to be loaded. And she knew just what she was gonna do. First, she was gonna clean the baby-ass white boy’s clock for him, and then she was gonna do the Really Bad Man. She’d let him have a second, give him a big grin so he knew just what was happening, and then she’d blow him away with his own gun.

Then she’d just have the pretty-boy jackal to worry about, and she wasn’t worried about him. A one-eyed man shooting at her in the dark didn’t scare her none, no sir. She’d do for him just as quick as lickety-split.

Detta swung the chamber back, then started to cock the hammer - paused, waited for the wind to come up to cover the sound - then cocked it and put the muzzle of the gun to the white boy’s temple.

\---

Though the woman thought him unaware, Cuthbert saw much of her actions.

She’d been fast asleep in her wheeled chair by the time he and Roland and Eddie had gotten back to her. They’d carried her gently enough and laid her down to sleep, covered against the mild chill of the seaside evening, and then sat down to eat, saving aside a portion for her when she woke.

After dinner, and after Eddie fell asleep, Roland had spoken of his plan to Cuthbert.

_ A child doesn’t understand a hammer ‘til he mashes his finger at a nail, _ Roland had said. Another of Cort’s sayings. That Roland saw himself in that role for Eddie was obvious; that it was the best way to teach Eddie was, perhaps, in question, but here Cuthbert would bow to his dinh, as was his duty. It was, indeed, quite a sharp lesson, one Eddie would not forget.

So he’d taken himself to the edge of camp to stare down the miles of featureless nothing stretching behind them, as if perhaps an army might come tramping up the beach.

But he’d positioned himself so that, by barely turning his head, he could see the camp and the sleeping figures there from the corner of his eye. So he saw when Odetta began to move, and he knew what she was doing, for the trap Roland had laid was as simple as it would be effective. 

She was fierce clever, that was for sure, with a natural born killer’s instincts. It was only inexperience, perhaps, or maybe sheer desire, that led her not to consider whether or not things were going  _ too _ easily her way. Aside from that, she did everything right. She moved quiet as anything, paused when she needed to, even used the sound of their environment to cover up the cocking of the gun - she’d make a fine gunslinger, assuming they could get her to come around.

He turned a bit more as the first empty  _ click _ of the hammer coming down on a spent shell came drifting to him on the wind. 

_ Come in only if it goes wrong on me _ , Roland had told him, for he wanted this to be Eddie’s lesson, though not Eddie’s final moments. 

Tense, ready to spring in if need be, Cuthbert watched. 

“Mother _ fucker _ ,” came Odetta’s outraged howl as she realized what had been done. Except it truly was not Odetta - even the sound of her voice was different.

He watched her raise the gun, heart in his throat - for if she killed Eddie, they had no way of opening the third door, and without medicine Roland would surely die. Likely would even if Cuthbert could get him to Alain in time, at that. Their own stores were sadly depleted after ten years, and neither of them had the knowing of how to make tonics from herbs, not the way a doctor or even a well-trained witch woman would.

Luckily, Eddie’s reflexes were good. Her scream woke him, and he rolled aside, taking the blow that would have split his skull across the jaw instead. Now Eddie bellowed into the night as well, as much in pain as in confusion, but that was nothing compared to the fury thundering out of the woman’s throat.

“Motherfucker!” she screamed again, fit to split the sky open. “Oh you dumb baby-ass fuckin’ white-boy motherfucker, I’m gonna kill you -” 

That was when Roland leapt for her, judging no doubt that Eddie’s lesson had been driven home. And that was when Cuthbert took himself over, because if it was going to go wrong, here was where it would.

“You want it, motherfucker?” the woman screamed at Roland, writhing beneath him in a mad and grotesque parody of sensuality. “Sure, I’ll give you what you want, you ugly motherfucker! Sure!”

“ _ Eddie _ ,” Roland called, his voice a commanding whipcrack that pierced through the woman’s furious screaming.

For a moment, Cuthbert thought he  _ was _ going to have to jump in after all. Eddie just went on crouching where he was, pain-stunned, while the woman howled invective and did her level best to split Roland’s skull open with his own gun.

Then, just as Cuthbert started in closer to grab her, Eddie moved and caught the gun on the downswing and tore it from her hand.

Cuthbert didn’t stop, though. Even disarmed, she was strong and dangerous, and Roland was ill and poorly rested. He dropped to his knees beside Roland and grabbed for the woman’s flailing hands, trying to hold her still.

“Eddie,” Roland called again.

Eddie was absorbed in staring at the blood on his fingers, which had come from his swelling jaw. “What the -” he said stupidly, staring.

“My  _ gunbelt _ ,” Roland snapped, and something in his voice woke Eddie fully from his stupor. “Get one of my gunbelts, we’ll turn her over and tie her hands behind her -”

“You won’t  _ never _ ,” the woman growled, and renewed her heaving and writhing so strenuously she nearly bucked Roland off. It was all Cuthbert could do to keep hold of her wrists.

They did, though. Between the two of them, they got her turned over, Roland kneeling with a knee in the small of her back and her wrists firmly in his grasp. All the while she kept trying to wriggle free, and when she couldn’t do that she darted her head out to bite at Cuthbert’s legs and hands on her shoulders.

Twice she actually got him, though thankfully both times the fabric of his jeans - ancient and well worn though they were by now, and thank all the gods large and small that he’d put them on for this trip - was thick enough to keep her teeth from sinking into his skin. He’d have an almighty couple of bruises on his thigh come tomorrow, though, he would.

Once she was tied, Roland went and fetched a length of tether rope from his purse. Eddie and Cuthbert lifted her into her chair, and there they tied her, just as she had earlier imagined - or falsely remembered - them doing.

“I feel like I’m gonna ralph,” Eddie said, his voice cracking like an adolescent’s. What the word he used meant, neither of the gunslingers quite knew, but the queasy look at his face made the meaning clear.

“Why don’t you just go on and eat each other’s  _ cocks _ ?” the struggling woman in the chair screamed. “Why don’t you just go on and do that if y’all too afraid of my cunt? Go on and suck each other’s little nasty candlesticks while you got the chance, ‘cause Detta is gonna cut those things right offa you when she gets outta this here chair! Sure will!”

“Why,” Cuthbert said, sitting on the sand and rubbing his leg where she’d gotten in the worse of her two bites, “perhaps she’s onto something there. Not a bad way to spend an evening, eh, after a bit of excitement?”

Both the other two ignored this. Roland was looking at Eddie, Eddie at the woman, and neither of them at him.

“ _ That’s  _ the woman I brought through,” Roland said. “Do you believe me now?”

“I believed you before,” Eddie said. “I told you that, man.”

“You  _ believed _ you believed,” Roland corrected him. “But you only really believed on the top of your mind. Do you believe it all the way down, now? Down to the bottom?”

Eddie looked at the woman tied to the wheeled chair, who hours earlier had been stubborn but perfectly pleasant. This new woman was nothing but piss and vinegar. If her screaming and struggling weren’t proof enough, there was the proof right on Eddie’s face: his swollen and discolored jaw, the gash across it still bleeding sluggishly.

“Yes,” he said, voice trembling. “God, yes.”

“This woman,” Roland said matter of factly, “is a monster.”

Eddie began to cry.

Roland started towards him, frowning, and lifted a hand. "Eddie -" he said, and then stopped. There was, briefly, such a look of helplessness in his eyes that it hurt Cuthbert to see - the desire of a man who knows he cannot give comfort to do just that - and then down came the wall, that hard look that said he  _ could _ not solve this problem so he  _ would _ not pay it any mind, and he turned from Eddie.

It was Cuthbert who climbed to his feet, paying no mind to the twinge in his bruised thigh, and put his arm around Eddie’s shoulders. He steered Eddie to the fire and sat him down, murmuring to him as he did, and then sat close beside him while his tears tapered off, offering the warmth and weight of his own body.

And it was Cuthbert who saw to Eddie’s jaw, once his sudden spate of tears had stopped. By then the gash had mostly stopped bleeding, so Cuthbert carefully wiped the blood off from around it and palpated Eddie’s jaw to make sure nothing was broken.

“You know,” Eddie said in a low voice, once Cuthbert had pronounced the wound painful but minor, “your buddy there’s got a real way with people.”

“Ah, well.” Cuthbert gave a rueful shrug. There wasn’t much he could say in return, for Eddie spoke true, and they both knew well that he did. “He’s a hard man, Roland, though not unfeeling. He simply isn’t deft with expressing it.”

“Yeah,” said Eddie bitterly, “that’s what you’re for, right? That’s a shit job for a shit boss, man.”

\---

When they finally stopped the next evening, having traveled a bare few miles from their starting point, Cuthbert was as exhausted as he could remember having been anytime in the last few years. 

Living off the land was weary work, true enough, but he had a good strong man to share the work with him, and the clean labor of living by one’s hands compared not at all to pushing an uncooperative she-devil through miles of rough terrain. The muscles of his arms and back had that queer baggy feeling they got when they were overworked, and the place low on his back where the bear had mauled him all those years ago throbbed with a steady, rotten ache, pulling steadily tighter and tighter until he could barely bend or twist at all.

Detta had started out the day promising difficulty with malicious glee, and she had delivered on her promises. Better than most prophets Cuthbert had ever known, was Detta Walker, when it came to following through.

At first the terrain had done most of her evil work for her. Clever a contraption as the wheeled chair was, it was ill-suited for moving along a beach. Luckily for them, their beach was coarse-grained enough the chair didn’t simply become mired, but they had to snake it around outcrops of rock. Even that would have been alright, were it not for what Eddie had called the sand-traps.

Those were pockets of finer grained sand scattered here and there about the beach. It was Eddie who took the first shift pushing and therefore Eddie who ran briskly into the first one, nearly upsetting the chair and going over himself with it. He’d gotten her out himself as well, heaving and grunting and sweating, while Detta leaned back and laughed, and at least they’d known to look out for them. Roland wasn’t much good for pushing - Cuthbert silently but pointedly took over from Eddie without allowing Roland the chance to volunteer, when it was time - but his eyes were keen and he did well at spotting the areas where they needed to slow.

Then there was the business with the brake. Cuthbert had been pushing then, trotting briskly along a good long stretch of firm beach, and because the woman had been unusually cooperative he had been braced for some bit of bedevilment, but it had still caught him by surprise when it came. 

Perhaps Eddie, who understood such devices better, might have been prepared for it, had Eddie been in a better state to pay attention. But Eddie wasn’t pushing but walking a little ways back with Roland, hot and tired and still hurt in his heart from the events of the past night, and Eddie - though he was sharpening up admirably quickly - was still sweating out the vestiges of his drug addiction, even though the acute stage of withdrawal was past. Eddie was more on guard than perhaps he had ever been in his life, but that wasn’t saying much right then.

All of a sudden, the wheelchair stopped dead. Cuthbert’s momentum carried him smack into the back of it, the crossbar slamming into his gut hard enough to wind him, and then the chair  _ did _ tip. He damn near went with it, and only managed to avoid doing so by letting go the handles and lurching backwards to fall on his ass in the sand.

A second later he was up and struggling to right the fallen chair. A moment later than that and Eddie was beside him, helping, and between the two of them they got the woman righted before she took any harm. She’d cackled the whole time, even though the ropes had dug cruelly into her skin and she’d sustained a wide but shallow cut above one eye. 

After that, Cuthbert had let Eddie have her for a time. They’d traded her back and forth, and there had been no more incidents - not for lack of trying, for she’d thrown her weight all about whenever she could, when she wasn’t simply sitting lax and heavy as death in the chair. 

She wouldn’t eat that evening. Even when all three of them ate of the meat Cuthbert produced from his rapidly dwindling stores to show her it wasn’t poison, she sulkily refused to take so much as a bite of it.

Eddie had fretted about that. “If she wants to starve herself,” said Roland, “let her. She’ll be easier to handle if she’s weak, and maybe we’ll be able to get somewhere.”

That earned him no favor from Eddie. Seeing a protest, and wanting to head it off, Cuthbert spoke up. “He’s right,” he said. His bruised gut and thigh still ached and his lower back was a band of hot agony from the bottom of his ribs on down; for all he cared right at that moment, the woman could starve herself as long as she liked. “And that aside, however spiteful the mind may be, the body wants to live. When she gets hungry enough, she’ll eat what we give her.”

He’d seen men eat rotten meat, eat their boots and belts, even eat each other. That Detta Walker would eventually submit to eating his jerky - or whatever meat they might kill fresh, if she didn’t give in before he ran out - he had no doubt.

It was on that thought that he went off into sleep, as soon as he’d laid his head down.

\---

Moments later, it seemed, he awoke to the sound of shrill screaming. No conscious thought moved him; his body lifted itself to its feet and dipped for his guns and had both of them out and cocked and ready before his brain realized it was simply Detta.

For a moment, Cuthbert was sore tempted to shoot her. He suspected he saw a similar temptation on Roland’s face. Had Eddie been in possession of a gun, he might have done, as much out of unthinking terror as exhausted fury.

“Just thought I’d see how quick you boys woke up,” she said, her eyes twinkling evilly in the dark. “Looks like rough country here. Looks like maybe there might be woofs or bobcats around. You got me all tied up like a tasty little morsel, wanna make sure I can get you up if a woof comes around.”

“Christ,” Eddie muttered groggily, and dropped back down to his bedroll.

“Don’t do it again,” Roland told the woman simply, holstering his gun.

“Oh? What’re you gonna do if I  _ do _ ?” Detta asked, her voice all sugary sweet innocence, her eyes glinting and mean. “Rape me?”

“If we were going to rape you,” Roland said with weary patience, “you’d be one well-raped woman by now. Don’t do it again.” He lay down as well and pulled his blanket over himself.

Detta looked at Cuthbert, her mouth now set in a hard, flat line. He shrugged, raised his eyebrows at her, and nodded towards Roland.  _ What he said _ .

Just as he’d drifted off again, the sound of her shrieking once more awakened him. Again his body rose like a marionette being jerked by its strings, again his hands went to his guns, and again there came that long moment of muddy confusion and alarm as his brain struggled to wake up and make sense of the situation.

This time, Roland advanced on her. Cuthbert took an uncertain step towards him. He didn’t think Roland would hurt the woman, exactly, but he also knew he couldn’t be sure  _ what _ Roland would do in the state he was in. Roland wasn’t given to displays of temper, but he certainly had one, and he was exhausted and ill on top of it -

But all Roland did was go down on one knee before her. “Listen to me, Odetta,” he said in his best silky, cozening voice. It was the voice that Cuthbert mentally thought of as his negotiating voice, put on whenever he had to call upon his own training in the arts of diplomacy rather than falling back on Cuthbert’s quicker, silverier tongue.

“That ain’t my name,” Detta snapped back tremulously. “What’re you callin’ me  _ O _ detta for?”

“Shut up, bitch,” Roland growled, and then just as quickly shifted back into the smooth voice of a man born to diplomacy as much as he’d been born to violence. “If you hear me, and if you can control her at all -”

“Why are you  _ talkin’ _ to me like that? Ain’t no one else here but me, boy, so you just shut up with that!”

“-keep her shut up. I can gag her, but I don’t want to. A hard gag is serious business. People choke.”

“You quit it, you nasty ugly motherfucker!”

“Odetta,” Roland whispered. The woman fell silent, staring at him with huge, hateful eyes. “I don’t think this bitch would care if she died on a hard gag. She wants to die, and more than that, she wants  _ you _ to die. But I don’t think you have, not yet. And I don’t think she’s new to your life. I think you’re in there somewhere, and if you are, and if you have any control over her, keep her quiet. Don’t let her wake us up a third time, Odetta. I don’t want to gag her, but I will if I have to.”

And, whether because Roland had simply frightened her too badly or because the buried Odetta had indeed been able to hear and act, she didn’t wake them again that night.

\---

The next day, the chair went over twice. The first time was Detta’s fault. She got her hand free again and pulled the handbrake, and that time it was Eddie who got the honor of cracking his ribs across the back of the fucking wheelchair. 

The second time, though, was all Eddie’s fault, and it was the worst one. He’d gotten mired down in one of those sand-traps again, and suddenly become convinced that this time he just  _ wouldn’t _ be able to get her out. Every muscle in his body was screaming and sore, had been for days, and he was so exhausted that the whole world felt glassy and unreal around him, and he had a sudden nightmare vision that the chair wouldn’t move and they’d have to untie her and fucking carry her or something like that, no doubt with her snapping at them the whole way.  _ Shoulda kept the fucking jank-ass stretcher I made, _ he thought, and heaved on the wheelchair with panicked desperation.

At once he knew it was a mistake. The chair started to tip, he felt it start to tip, but he didn’t have time to stop it, and over she’d gone, cackling madly the whole way. At least Cuthbert was there to help, and at least he was limber and strong and not being eaten slowly by fever. Eddie didn’t want to think of how nightmarish the trip would’ve been with just him and Roland.

They got her up just in time, even so. One of the ropes had shifted solidly across her windpipe, and her face was a dark and dusky purple by the time they got her upright and readjusted her bindings. As soon as she got her breath back, though, she just kept laughing at them.

She wouldn’t eat that night, either, no matter what Eddie did to try and prove their meat wasn’t poisoned. Although part of him knew that what Cuthbert and Roland had said was right - the more she weakened, the less trouble she caused them, and likely she  _ would _ reach a point where the need to eat overcame her paranoia - the rest of him felt, in some vague way, responsible. It didn’t sit right with him to sit around a warm fire and eat filling, if not particularly appetizing, food, while she sat there tied into her chair and starving.

She didn’t scream that night, at least… but the next morning, she was still there.

And that morning, they barely made two miles. The terrain was getting steadily stonier as the hills encroached, and it meant they had to steer the chair around larger and larger outcroppings of stone the same way they’d had to do with the sand-traps. Eddie was growing wearier as well, and even Cuthbert was flagging… but Roland was worst of all.

Roland seemed to be almost fading, turning into a hollow shadow of himself. The red lines came back, marching steadily up the soft underside of his arm towards his heart, and the farther they went the deeper into himself he seemed to sink. Cuthbert hovered near him constantly, urging him to eat more at night and watching him like a hawk during the day - watching for him to finally just fold up and pass out, Eddie figured. His concern was dreadful in its helplessness. As little as Eddie liked Roland, he hated to see the man this way, and he could only imagine that his friend hated it even more.

The evening of that third day, Eddie finally voiced the concern that had been eating at him. “What if she doesn’t come back?” he asked in a low voice, after dinner but before they’d turned in for sleep. “What if we’re just stuck with Detta?”

“Oh, dreadful,” Cuthbert muttered. “Say it not, Eddie. Only a fool speaks the worst into being.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Roland said. His voice had grown almost as hoarse as Detta’s, though not from screaming but simply from the new fever-swelling going on there. “Been thinking… If we could get her to Alain…”

“Oh!” Cuthbert brightened up considerably. “Oh, of course -” Then he propped his chin on his fist and frowned. “It’s still a fair way to the home place, Ro. I could reach for him now and get him on his way to us, but you know it’s slow going for him. Might be we could trade places, though we’ve never tried to do that at such a distance -”

Roland waved a hand. “Not yet. Another day, maybe. I’ve got at least that much in me. If she’s still Detta by tomorrow night…”

“Excuse me,” Eddie put in, very reasonably, “but would anyone care to enlighten me on what the fuck you’re talkin’ about?”

The both regarded him with almost comical surprise. Then Cuthbert smiled ruefully. “Alain has the touch, Eddie, I’ve told you that -”

“Yeah, you’ve said that about a thousand times, but what the fuck does that  _ mean _ ? Where I’m from we say someone’s touched in the head, but I don’t think that’s what you mean.”

“Well…” Cuthbert seemed genuinely taken aback for a moment. “It means he has spiritual abilities, I suppose one could say. He can look into a man’s mind and read his thoughts or send his own, or look into his heart and read his true feelings. He has prophetic dreams and sees omens, though of course ‘tis one thing to see such and quite another to know what they mean.”

“So,” Eddie said flatly, “the guy’s psychic. That’s what you’re saying?”

Cuthbert shrugged. “If that’s what that word means, then yes. Were he here, he could go into the woman’s mind and draw out her better half. Perhaps even unify the two of them into one whole. Of course -”

“Of course, he’s not here,” Eddie finished. “Of course. No offense, you’ve been a big help and all, but seems to me that maybe you two sent the wrong guy down the beach. Maybe if your buddy was a better psychic he’d’a known we’d need him instead -”

“Hush,” Roland said softly. He looked first at Eddie, then at Cuthbert, until the both of them settled back. “You cannot be at odds with each other. Not now.” Not when he was so sick and the two of them were all he had to rely on, Eddie knew. “We’ll see what can be done. In the meantime, we’ll go on. What will happen will happen.”

“Ka,” Cuthbert muttered.

Roland favored him with a tired, humorless smile. “Ka indeed.”

“Kaka,” Eddie opined. And on that note he rolled himself up into his blankets and tried to sleep, though sleep did not come for a good long while.

\---

“Rise and shine, motherfucker!” came Detta’s screeching voice, jerking him up out of unconscious. “Rise and shone, both’a you! I think your ugly butt-buddy done left the building! Think maybe it’s just the three of us now! You two gonna have to suck each other’s li’l bitty baby dicks now!”

Eddie looked blearily at the huddled shape of Roland, curled so terribly small under his blankets. For a moment, he was sure she was right. Before he’d even had time to entirely think that thought, though, Cuthbert was kneeling at Roland’s side, hands on his face, wearing such an expression of naked terror that Eddie was almost ashamed to look at him.

Roland groaned, then slowly rose. He did it in jerky little steps, first up onto his elbow, then sitting up, and then - laboriously, with much assistance from Cuthbert - climbing to his feet. There he stood, grey-faced and sweating, his eyes sunken in their sockets, swaying. But he stood.

“Well, look here!” Detta crowed. “I thought you checked out on us, Mister Man.”

“A lot of people have thought that, Detta,” Roland said dully. He looked at Eddie. “Are you ready?”

“Are  _ you _ ?” Eddie couldn’t help asking. Roland didn’t look ready to do anything except keel over and die, truth be told.

“Yes.”

“ _ Can _ you?”

Again that silent, haunted look, those pale blue eyes staring out with unbelievable, unearthly force, even as the flesh shrunk off the face around them and the shape of the skull beneath emerged. “Yes.”

They went on.

After a handful of slow hours, Detta started rubbing her temples with her fingers. Just slowly at first, but then with more and more force. Finally, she spoke up.

“Stop,” she moaned, voice thick. “I feel like I’m gonna throw up. Feel sick. Stop.”

“Oh, probably that big meal you ate last night,” Eddie said, and went on pushing. “I told you going back for seconds on the chocolate layer cake would come back to bite you, but you never -”

“Stop, Eddie,” Roland said.

Eddie stopped.

Detta stayed as she was, eyes squeezed shut, head ducked down between her shoulders, rubbing at her temples. Rubbing and rubbing. She made a noise, a ragged little hurt sound, and then suddenly jerked and twisted around as if shocked, eyes wide.

“ _ I broke your fuckin’ plate, you nasty old Blue Lady _ ,” she screamed at the top of her hoarse, breaking voice. “ _ I broke it and I’m fuckin’ glad I di -” _

Then she fell silent and still, slumped forward in her chair. At first Eddie thought she must have had a stroke or something, that she’d just fallen down dead - that kind of thing could happen to people who’d had head injuries, couldn’t it? She’d had a stroke or maybe an aneurysm, some old blood clot that had been sitting in there silently for years until it moved and blocked just the right vein and busted her whole brain up, and now she was dead and they were fucked because with  _ her _ dead,  _ Roland _ was going to die, and with Roland dead he was going to be trapped in this hellscape forever, and -

He started to go around the front of the chair to check on her, then stopped. Maybe it was another trick. Could be another trick.

He looked up, over at Roland and then at Cuthbert. They were both frozen as well, eyes on the woman.

Softly, she moaned. Then she sat up, and opened her eyes, and wonder of wonder, they were  _ her _ eyes. Odetta’s eyes.

“Dear god, I’ve fainted again, haven’t I?” she said. “I’m sorry you had to tie me in. I think I could sit up a little now, though, if you wou -”

A squawk of surprise cut her off and tore Eddie’s gaze from her. It had come from Cuthbert; as Odetta was speaking, Roland had done what he’d been threatening to do since he got up, and simply folded gracelessly into an unconscious pile on the ground.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are not at the end of my buffer of chapters yet! I have just been very busy with work lately and spent the last couple of weeks coming home and passing out, more or less. Here is a new chapter for you all, and more to come, hopefully more regularly!

Before Eddie could come more than a step closer, Cuthbert had gathered Roland up into his arms and started dragging him into the shade of a nearby outcropping. It chilled Eddie’s heart to see how easily he lifted Roland, who had a good few inches on him and was much more heavily built. Despite eating every day, Roland was gaunter than Odetta.

Eddie wheeled Odetta in as close as he could to keep the rising sun off her, then came and crouched down next to the two gunslingers, feeling spectacularly useless. “Is he alright?” It was a stupid question, but the only one he had.

Cuthbert glanced up at him, then went on dabbing water on Roland’s face and neck. “No. But he’s coming around.”

And indeed Roland was. He groaned and stirred, then opened his eyes, though for the moment he didn’t try to sit up. He just lay there, his head on Cuthbert’s knee, looking up at the underside of the rockface with dull, half-open eyes.

“Feed her,” he croaked.

“You -” Eddie started, but Roland cut him off with a jerky wave of his hand.

“Never mind me. Bert’s got me just fine.  _ You _ go feed her. She’ll eat now, I think. You’re both going to need your strength.”

“What if she’s just pretending to be -”

“She’s not pretending to be anything,” Roland said, waving his hand impatiently. “Except for alone in her body. You know. I know. It’s in her face. Go feed her, for your father’s sake, and then come back to me. Every minute counts now, Eddie. Every second.”

When Eddie started to go, Roland grabbed his wrist. His fingers felt like dry twigs, the skin wrapped around them burning hot. His eyes bored into Eddie’s.

“Say nothing to her of the other. Whatever lies she comes up with to explain the time she’s missing, don’t contradict her.”

“Why?”

Roland shrugged jerkily, frowning. “You don’t have time to argue with her about it. I don’t know. It just isn’t the time. Now do as I say and don’t waste time!”

Cuthbert wordlessly proffered his pack to Eddie. The meat left over from last night’s kill was wrapped up with the dwindling supply of dried rations they’d been sharing. How much Cuthbert had packed when he’d left, Eddie had no way of knowing, but it had been a lot, and now there was maybe a day or two left. Probably less than that, with three people eating.

When Eddie came up and offered her the chunks of last night’s lobster - they’d been eating fresh more often, and now he knew why - 

Eddie had no idea what would happen, given that she’d refused to eat a morsel from them. Still, he gave her an edgy smile and said, as gently as he could, “It doesn’t hurt to try again. You need to keep your strength up. We’ve got to go as fast as we can.”

She laughed softly and touched his hand. The contact sent a little spark looping lazily up his arm. It  _ was _ her, he knew in that moment. No doubt about it. “Oh, you’re so kind, Eddie. You’ve tried so hard, been so patient. You all have, even him.” She nodded towards the outcropping of rock, where Roland still lay. “He’s a hard man to - to come to care for, though. I don’t know how his friend does it.”

“Habit, I suppose,” Eddie said. It mystified him as well. Then again, he knew a bit more than Odetta did, and from the sound of it, they’d been alone together for a long time. 

She laughed again. “I’ll try one more time. For you.” She took the lobster meat from him and then wrinkled her nose. “Must I, though?”

“Just give it a try.”

“I never ate scallops again.”

“Pardon?” Eddie felt like a man trying to run an obstacle course blindfolded. Obviously she’d come up with some sort of fiction to explain the last few days, and of course she expected he knew it, because in her mind he’d been right there alongside her, but he didn’t have a clue.

“I thought I told you,” she said, looking at him strangely. He shrugged with a nervous little giggle, and she gave him an indulgent smile. “Well, maybe you forgot. When I was ten or eleven, we had them one night for dinner. I thought they were disgusting, like little hard balls of rubber. I ate them, but then I threw them all back up, and I never ate them again. But…” She sighed, regarding the lobster meat almost balefully. “I suppose I’ll have to give it a try, as you say.”

If that didn’t work, there was always the jerky, though he didn’t want to deplete that just yet. The way things were going, they might be glad of food no one had to kill or cook in a couple of days.

But it did work. She took the first bite tentatively, then the next with more confidence, and then she wolfed down the last remaining chunks, her face shining with excitement. And lobster grease.

“Of  _ course _ ,” she crowed, “it must be a different  _ kind _ ! We’ve moved up the beach and the species has changed! I’m no longer allergic! Oh, it’s good, Eddie, it doesn’t taste nasty like it did before, and I’m keeping it down… I did  _ try _ before, didn’t I? I tried very hard.” Her eyes begged him to say so. 

“Yeah,” Eddie said distantly. What she thought was becoming clear. In her mind, she’d been eating every day and throwing it all up because she had some kind of reaction to the meat. That was why she thought she was so weak. “Yeah, you - you were a real trooper.”

“But I can  _ eat _ this,” she went on happily. “I’m going to take nourishment! I can feel it!”

“Just don’t overdo it,” Eddie cautioned her, and handed over one of the waterskins. “Gotta get your stomach used to it, you know. All that -” he swallowed hard, throat clicking. “All that throwing up.” Now that she was eating again, not to mention drinking in huge gulping swallows, he knew she would be alright. And that was one burden off his shoulders, with only about a hundred more to go. “Okay, look, I need to go talk to Roland for a second.”

“Yes,” Odetta said, but reached out to grasp his wrist. “Thank you, though. And tell  _ him _ thank you too. And… don’t tell him he scares me.” Though there were two men sitting beneath the outcropping of rock, there was no need to ask who she meant. After their little confrontation in front of Odetta’s door, Eddie wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking Cuthbert was any less deadly than Roland, but there was just something about Roland - some hardness, some sense that he would do whatever he needed to do to get where he needed to be, no matter how bloody or difficult - that just wasn’t there in Cuthbert.

“Hunker down,” Roland said when he got over there. He was sitting up now on his own, propped against the wall. “Bert and I have been talking.”

“Yeah?” Eddie said, hunkering.

“Yes.” Roland patted the ground beside him, shooting Eddie a tight look that was almost a smile. “Bert is going to leave us the last of his dried rations and a couple of the waterskins. He’s better loaded than I with bullets, and none of his wet, and a deft hand with the sling besides. He and yon woman won’t lack for food, and -”

“Wait,” Eddie said slowly, as comprehension came. “Wait. You’re sending your buddy here off with her -”

“To the door,” Roland interrupted him, “yes. He’s stronger than you and it’ll go faster with her helping.”

“And what,” Eddie asked, “I’m gonna come up behind lugging your carcass? No offense, but you don’t seem up for a noontime stroll.”

“I’m not.” Roland stared steadily at him. Beside him, Cuthbert looked at Eddie with a curious, wry twist to his mouth, as if expecting him to say something. “Once they reach the door, he’s going to leave her and come back to us with the chair. You’ll be better rested then, and we’ll make better time.”

“ _ Leave _ her?” Now Eddie understood that look. He’d been waiting for Roland’s plan to really sink in. He’d known there was some element of bastardy to it - even a few days in Roland’s company had made it very clear the man was a bastard through and through - but this - “Christ, you can’t just leave a crippled woman alone in the middle of nowhere! What if some of those lobster things get her? What if there’s shit up in those hills?”

“I don’t mean to toss her into the ocean, Eddie,” Cuthbert said mildly. “Nor leave her entirely unarmed.”

That Roland would do such a thing, Eddie had no doubt. Roland wouldn’t trust her enough. But Cuthbert - Cuthbert was a hard cookie, of that Eddie had no doubt either, but there was maybe still a human being underneath the bullshit there. Still, Eddie regarded him suspiciously. 

“I know you don’t like it,” Roland said, which was the understatement of the fuckin’ century, “but this is the best way.”

“Don’t see why we can’t both go,” Eddie muttered, and felt immediately ashamed. Leaving Roland alone in the state he was in would be almost as bad as leaving Odetta alone without her chair. Maybe worse. She was crippled, not dying. He felt protective of her, sure, but she’d be fine. “Okay. Sure. I stay and babysit, and Bluebeard over here goes racing off to find this magic door. What if he doesn’t?”

“He will,” Roland said with serene assurance, and there was no arguing with him.

\---

Hunger gnawed the pit of her belly with sharp needle teeth. It wasn’t a feeling she was used to, although it was familiar in some visceral and  _ old _ way, like catching a whiff of perfume someone she’d known years ago had worn. Perhaps she’d felt something like it as a very young child, during those years she couldn’t recall, before her parents had started  _ getting ahead _ , but never in the parts of her life that she could remember.

Still, she pumped the wheels of her chair just as fast as she could, despite the rubbery weakness in her muscles and the sour pinching in her stomach. Speed, she knew, was of the essence.

And were they ever speeding! The beach flew past in a blur, the salty sea breeze whipping past her so fast it was almost cold, so fast it dried the sweat of exertion right off her face. It took all her concentration to keep her eyes peeled and call out directions to the man pushing her.

And was he ever pushing! Never in her life had Odetta gone so fast in her chair, not even on the well-paved streets and sidewalks she’d known all her life. He  _ ran _ , the sound of his heavy breathing a steady engine-beat above her, and she pumped the wheels and leaned into the wind, and despite the pangs of hunger and the deadly serious nature of their mission and her own misgivings at being so far from home and in the company of a man she barely knew, it was exhilarating.

When he started to slow down, first to a jog and then to a fast walk, she craned her head back to look up at him.

“Are we stopping?” she asked. “I can keep going for a little while longer.”

“Not stopping,” he panted, directing a tight smile down at her. “Just slowing down a bit. Ride your horse until he’s lame, and it’ll only take you quicker to the point of having to walk on your own two feet.” That had the quality of a lesson learned long ago. A moment later he added, “Our  boyhood teacher said that. Cort. Hard man, but he knew the value of good horseflesh.”

Both of them - this man Cuthbert and his frightening friend - seemed hard to her. It was difficult to imagine a man they thought of as such. It was difficult to imagine either of them as boys in need of tutelage.

“You ought to rest a bit,” he told her. “You’re still weak from your -” a slight pause, and then his voice took on an undertone of sly amusement - “illness. And you’re a great help to me pushing, so best you conserve your strength.”

Probably most people wouldn’t have heard that undertone. Odetta, accustomed to a life of sidelong glances and fake politeness from people who thought of themselves as too civilized to be outright rude, caught it right away though.

And what did he think was so funny about her illness? Did he think she’d been faking it? Was he simply the sort of man who took amusement in others suffering? That, she didn’t know.

But the tone had been there. 

That was why, even though he seemed perfectly pleasant, certainly much more so than his friend, she didn’t trust him. There was something crooked about him, something sly. Something  _ shifty _ . He covered it up by smiling and laughing, but it was there, waiting to turn his handsome face into the face of a grinning jackal.

“Alright,” she said, and folded her hands into her lap. In truth, she welcomed the break. The muscles of her arms had gone all rubbery and baggy and her shoulders ached in a way she knew meant they would be screaming later tonight, and the constant roiling hunger had her feeling nauseous and lightheaded.

She could still steer, at least. That she did for the next hour or so, until her arms started to feel normal. She was just about to start pumping the wheels again when they began to slow even further and then came to a rolling stop, the gritty sand popping and crunching beneath the chair’s sturdy tires.

There wasn’t much in the way of shade, still, but he wheeled her beneath a stand of stunted white trees. 

“I’m growing peckish myself, and I wager you’ve quite a hunger, so I’m going to go about getting us a lunch,” he told her, pulling the sling from his belt as he did.

The thing didn’t look like much of a weapon to Odetta - more a boy’s plaything than anything else. But then again, she supposed Goliath had thought something similar.

He stalked back and forth on the beach, then stood suddenly, almost shockingly still, the sling ready to hand but not yet drawn. He stood in profile, the undamaged side of his face towards her, and he looked handsome and ancient at once, limned so against the grey beach and slate sea and wide blue sky. He looked not like a man at all but like some unearthly well-carved statue.

Then one of the ubiquitous seabirds swooped in close enough and he burst into motion, his hands a blur as he brought the sling up and shot a rock into the air. At first Odetta was sure that he’d missed, but the bird fell straight down to the beach. While it was falling, he shot at a second. That shot flew wide. The corner of his mouth drew down in a frown, but there was no impatience in the lines of his body as he pulled the cup of the sling back for another shot. A minute passed, and another, and still his arm didn’t waver, still he didn’t move - then another bird came close, and he shot it handily. Then he tucked the sling back into his pocket and went to gather up his kills.

He came loping back to her with the dead birds cradled in one arm, grinning proud as any boy come to show his momma the bug he just caught. The expression lit his sharp and narrow face right up, gave her a glimpse of the laughing young man he might once have been. Whatever had ground him and Roland down into the sharp old things they were now?

“Have’ee ever plucked a fowl before?” he asked her cheerfully, and dropped one into her lap. “‘Tisn’t difficult. I’ve no doubt a clever woman such as you will pick it right up.”

Odetta sat, bemused, holding the limp and still warm corpse of the bird in her hands. “And where are you going?”

“To gather tinder and lay us a fire, my good lady!” he called back over his shoulder. “T’other one I’ll see to after that.”

While he prowled the jagged hills to the east, Odetta set to plucking. It wasn’t difficult, no, but it was tiring on the hands to grip and pull the tiny little feathers, and she couldn’t help but to feel crawlingly  _ dirty _ in every part she touched the bird with. Raw meat didn’t particularly bother her, but the prepared cuts she bought from the butcher were a far cry from the feathery little corpse in her hands. Birds, she’d always been told as a girl, were dirty and had parasites.

By the time Cuthbert came back and laid and kindled the fire, she was halfway done with the bird. He plopped down beside the fledgling fire and went about denuding his own fowl with the same easy speed he’d shown earlier when he’d shot it down.

“You’re good at that,” she said.

He smiled at her. “Aye, I’ve had some years of practice, I have. By the time our journey’s done, I’ve no doubt you’ll be as deft a hand at it as I am, and Eddie too.”

She didn’t think he spoke just of their trip to the third door. “You and your friend back there, you’ve been on this quest a long time, haven’t you?” Eddie had spoken of it to her, she remembered that, although her head had been aching badly during the conversation and quite a lot of it was dreamy and indistinct.

“Long and long,” Cuthbert agreed. “And longer still to go, though I think we’re closer now than ever we’ve been. That’s no portent, mind you, simply a feeling I have.”

A shiver ran up her back. It sounded portentous enough to her. “Should we be stopping like this?” she asked, suddenly desperate to be off the subject of the quest she’d been drafted into. “Your friend is very sick.”

“He is.” He regarded her seriously, one dark eye and one empty hole where once an eye had been, his hands still busy with their work. “And we’ll push on tonight ‘til it’s too dark to see and rise before the sun tomorrow. In the meantime, we both of us need to eat, you especially.”

He gutted his bird with the same practiced speed, then put it on a spit over the fire and took hers. “No insult to you,” he said with an easy smile, “but as you yourself observed, we’re precious short on time.”

“I understand,” she said. “When you’re done, would you perhaps take me down to the sea so I can clean my hands?”

He did her one better, and brought back a cup of seawater which he heated in the fire for a time, then used to wet a rag from his pack. She scrubbed her hands clean, and then he did his own.

When the birds were cooked, he ate half of his with ravenous speed. To her he gave a wing and drumstick, and wrapped the rest of her bird up and gave her to hold, with instructions to eat small portions as they went.

Almost as quickly as they’d made their little camp, Cuthbert unmade it. He kicked sand over the fire, stowed the waterskin and remainder of his own meal, shouldered his pack, and then they were off again.

As he’d promised, they went that night until it was too dark to see. Odetta helped as much as she could, but she was just so  _ tired _ \- a consequence of having been so sick, she was sure. It was frustrating beyond belief. The last time she could remember having felt so weak was in the months after she’d lost her legs. Aside from being mostly legless, her body was hearty and hale and had always borne up well under whatever she asked of it, and she liked this helpless weakness not a bit. For the last couple of hours she simply sat in her chair and steered, calling out obstacles to Cuthbert, and at some point towards the end of the trip she started to doze.

The first couple of times she caught herself. Then, all of a sudden, she awoke in utter bewilderment, being jostled about in the dark, and it took her a few crucial seconds to regain consciousness enough to understand that she was being lifted out of her chair and carried to a spot high up on the beach, well away from the tideline and the crawling horrors that lived there.

“Easy,” Cuthbert said when she started in surprise. “I shan’t drop you.”

His grip was sure indeed. “You’re strong,” Odetta mumbled sleepily, “for such a skinny man. Wouldn’t have thought…” 

He let her doze while he kindled them a nightfire and killed them dinner, then shook her awake to eat. Wary of the sea-creatures still, she ate slowly, but her stomach readily accepted the food just as it had earlier in the day when Eddie had fed her. Thinking of him - of how patiently he’d fed her - made her wish with surprising force that he was the one who’d come with her. Sure, she barely knew him, but the man sitting beside her was even more fundamentally unknown to her, not simply of another race or time or place but of another  _ world _ .

A lump grew in her throat. She tilted her head back to stare fixedly up at the sky until it passed, and what she saw up there drove all thoughts of homesickness from her mind and heart, at least for a moment.

A brilliant sprawl of stars covered the night sky - a thousand, a million, a million million, in places clustering so densely together that they looked like white dust spilled across the velvet cloth of the sky. She saw not just stars but whole galaxies out there in the infinite blackness of space, every one coldly brilliant and shining so close that she felt she could almost reach up and touch them.

“Why,” she whispered, unable to help herself, “it’s  _ beautiful _ .”

Cuthbert looked upwards with the casual air of someone who saw something beautiful every day, until it became simply routine. “It is,” he agreed, smiling a crooked little smile at her. “Though those mountains are in the way a bit - were we somewhere flat, that’d truly be a sight to show you.”

“You don’t get skies like this where I’m from,” she told him. It was important to her, all of a sudden, that he understand what a gorgeous sight it was. “There’s too much light in the cities. You can’t see all the stars.”

“Is that so?” He glanced over at her, and then up at the sky again. He drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, and for a moment his face bore an expression of such lost and naked longing that it made Odetta’s throat tighten up again. “I’ve seen such a sight a time or two. Back when lost Gilead still stood, why, on certain holidays the whole castle and low town would be lit up so blazing bright you couldn’t hardly see the sky… every glow-light in the place glowing just as fiercely as it could, and thousands of candles, and in the low town folk would light bonfires and send up fireworks, and no one would sleep at all the whole night…” In the flickering firelight she caught a glimpse of the boy he must once have been, as long lost now as his destroyed home.

She could almost see it - the huge castle shining against the night sky, the town that sprawled in its shadow glittering as if festooned with jewels, a riot of humanity clamoring against the impersonal vastness of the night, of space, of the world upon whose skin they so briefly rested. Throngs of people dressed in their best clothes - such finery, such strange and lovely fashions! - filling the streets and the lawns and spilling out into the empty places all around, a rising babble of voices…

“The world has moved on now, of course,” Cuthbert said, drawing her back out of the vision in which she’d momentarily lost herself. “Folk are grown few and their settlements small, and hardly anyone kens the working of electricity anymore.” 

Silence fell between them. She was tempted to reach out to him - she remembered the way he’d gone to her when she’d first come through, and she wanted to return some measure of that comfort - but what could she say? And there was, too, the fact that she was still a bit nervous to be alone with this man she didn’t know. He hadn’t been anything but polite, but if he thought she were  _ intending _ something - 

Before she could decide to either try or not, though, he spoke up once more. “Do’ee recognize any of the stars? I’ve always wondered whether there are different stars on different worlds, I have.”

Odetta frowned thoughtfully up at the sky. It was hard to say; the wild profusion of stars she saw was nothing like the night sky she had known back on Earth, but it might just be because there were so many more of them. “I’m not sure,” she said at last. “Everything looks so different from what I’m used to.”

“Well,” Cuthbert said, raising a hand to point into the sky, “let me show you how we call them here. That’s Old Star there, and Old Mother acrost from him. They were married once, but came to grief as many couples do when his randy eye fell upon a pretty little thing -”

He told her of the stars in the sky while the fire burned down, sketching out all the legends his world had hung upon the celestial bodies. When, finally, they went to sleep, she still felt that sense of profound dislocation - would feel it all the time she was in this world, she suspected - but felt, at least, less alone.

\---

They rose with the sun, Odetta every bit as sore as she’d expected to be, and stiff from sleeping on the ground as well. She rolled over, sat up, and stretched, joints crackling.

“I feel much the same,” Cuthbert intoned dolorously from beside her. He sat hunched over, knuckling at the small of his back, and stood with slow difficulty to gather up their few possessions. “I tell you, ‘tis a torment to grow old, my lady, truly. A man of my age ought to be enthroned upon a plushly cushioned chair beside a roaring fire, surrounded by grandchildren to fetch and cook and carry for me and listen to all my glorious stories of bygone days as if I haven’t told them a hundred times already.”

Smiling, Odetta said, “Oh, you’re surely not old enough to be a  _ grand _ father.” 

“I surely could have been, had things gone differently for me,” he said, sounding almost regretful, “but as it stands, I’m simply an old man sleeping rough, though at least ‘tis in the company of a beautiful woman. Which -” he grinned at her, his tone lightening - “is more than Roland or Alain can say right now, for a surety, so perhaps I am the luckier of us three. Say, what do you think of the two of us running off together? I know a lovely place where we could bunk down, snug and warm and better furnished than this beastly strand, and it could surely use a woman’s touch -”

“I think your mouth’s already running off,” Odetta observed mildly, smiling to take the sting out of it. He didn’t seem the type to take quick offense, though.

“Oh, aye,” he agreed readily, “it causes me such trouble, it does. My tongue’s hung in the middle and runs at both ends, as we say. Shall we get on, now?”

She agreed that they should. They shared a breakfast of last night’s leftovers, and then got on.

They raced steadily up the beach, and to their right the slumped foothills marched steadily in closer and closer. There would come a point up ahead, and not very far either, where those hills intersected the beach and went marching off into the ocean. Odetta observed the gradual encroachment with mounting unease, wondering if Roland had given his friend instructions on what to do if they came to the end of the beach without spotting the door. The stretch of beach they were currently on was firm and easy to navigate, barely a beach at all, but there’d be trouble getting her chair through the tangled scrub growth covering the hills.

Cuthbert, by comparison, seemed to grow more and more pleased the closer they came to the end of the beach. He hummed as he pushed her along, and once or twice even burst out into laughter for no reason she could discern.

At first she figured it was because he thought they must be near the end of their trek, and in plenty of time to help Roland. And that might have been so, but she suddenly recalled something he’d said to her on that first day - just about a week ago, though it felt more like a month - when she’d been so terrified at finding herself suddenly in an alien world rather than the familiar comfort of her own living room that she’d burst into tears. 

_ A cozy home _ , he’d said,  _ and folk waiting to meet us.  _ And he’d spoken of another companion from time to time, hadn’t he? She twisted around in the chair to look up at him and said, “We’re getting close to your other friends, aren’t we? The ones you said were up the beach.”

“Why,” he said, looking more than a little surprised she’d remembered, “we surely are. Just the one friend, although he’s a very good friend and quite a large man, so perhaps he could count for two. I overstated the case a bit, for you seemed quite distressed.”

“I was.” And more than a little embarrassed, now, at the state she’d ended up in. Eddie and Cuthbert had both been quite comforting, quite kind - and remembering that, she felt a flash of guilt for her earlier distrust of him - but she knew how men were about crying women. They’d come over sweet as anything while the tears were falling, but they wouldn’t take you seriously after that. “Is he going to come down and meet us?”

For a moment Cuthbert didn’t answer. He slowed his pace, a distracted and inward sort of look on his face, then said slowly, “Perhaps… no. No, I don’t think so. Were I to call him down right now, it would still be a handful of days before he arrived, and I do believe we’ll be through with everything one way or t’other before then.”

“And how would you do that?” Odetta asked, smiling a little. “Smoke signals?”

“Oh, no,” Cuthbert replied, still in that slow and distracted way. “I lost touch of him for a time there, but we’ve come close enough he can reach my mind again. A good thing it is, too, for I’m not shy to admit I’ve worried. He gets into dreadful trouble without me around, he does.” 

A prickling wave of uneasiness swept over her. “Is this the one you say is a psychic?” All of a sudden, she didn’t want to meet the man. Just why that would be, she wasn’t sure, and that just made it worse. She was a rational woman, an  _ educated _ woman, and maybe that was just one impossible thing too many, but -

Cuthbert looked down at her, his expression suddenly sharp. Just for a second, but she saw it. Then it was gone, and his voice when he spoke was nothing but casual… but she’d seen it. And she’d just been feeling bad for distrusting him, hadn’t she? He was a sneaky, shifty one indeed. “Yes, that’s Alain. I  _ must _ be getting old, for I almost couldn’t recall having spoken to you of that, but of course I surely did.”

“Yes,” Odetta agreed, feeling uneasier than ever. He must have, because how else could she know it? But she couldn’t exactly remember when or what he’d said, either, just that they had a friend who -  _ they wanted to let poke his sticky fingers around in her head  _ \- they said could read minds and such. “I don’t really believe in that sort of thing. There have been no documented cases of  _ true _ psychic ability, only clever fraudsters -”

“Perhaps ‘tis true in your world,” Cuthbert interrupted mildly, “but such abilities are perfectly - well, not  _ common _ , I suppose, but they happen often enough in ours. Save your skepticism until after you’ve met him, why not?”

“Alright,” Odetta said. And thought, in a voice that did not quite sound like her own,  _ We’ll just see what happens when I meet your nosy friend. Sure. _

\---

Just a few hours later, she spotted it. “Stop!” she cried out in her excitement, and Cuthbert stopped so quickly she was jolted forward and had to grab onto the arms of the chair to keep from spilling out. No matter.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, craning to peer into her face.

Odetta raised a hand and jabbed a pointing finger north. “There! Do you see it?”

He squinted, then raised a hand to shade his eye and swung his head slowly from one side to the other. “Perhaps… is it the door you’ve spotted? How far away is it, do you reckon?”

“It’s down there at the end of the beach, just standing all by itself. Maybe…” Now it was her turn to squint at the distant, impossible object. “A few more hours, for sure, but I think we’ll reach it by the end of the day.” Of that she was reasonably sure, surer than he could likely be.

It wasn’t much later that he spotted it himself, and told her she had good eyes. By mid-afternoon there was no doubting it, for it stood clearly visible, just before the place where the hills finally made good on their threats and plunged across the beach and into the sea.

By early evening, they were there.

Cuthbert, who had seen such a door before, still stalked around the thing like some long and leggy bird, head turning this way and that to get all of it in his sights. He pushed Odetta around the back of it with him, to show her the way it abruptly vanished after a certain point, the way that from the back side it didn’t seem to be there at all.

It was as forbidding and heavy a door as any Odetta had ever seen. It looked like a proper  _ dread portal _ , from some fantastical story of horror. Written on the front, in bold and somehow ugly letters, was  **THE PUSHER.**

“Now what,” Odetta wondered aloud, “does that mean?”

Cuthbert could only shrug. “I can’t say. Perhaps ‘twill mean something to Roland. It is his door, after all.” Plainly he was eager to be off, and she couldn’t blame him. His friend lay dying on the beach two days away, and even after he got back there he would still have to come back  _ here _ , this time with Roland in the chair. Odetta doubted Roland would be as much of a help on that trip as she had been.

She glanced at the tangle of kelp and sea debris that marked the high tide line, perilously close to the door. “Is this far enough away from where those  _ things _ come?”

Cuthbert eyed the beach as well, then shrugged, mouth quirked to the side. “I’m not so good at judging distance as once I was. Like as not you’re better able to tell than I. Better to be safe, I think, and leave you up closer to the hills.” 

And so he wheeled her up to the edge of the hills and set her down beside a scrubby tangle of grey-green brush. As he was settling her in, an animal screamed somewhere in the hills above them, a furious yowl that split the air and rose to a fevered pitch like a demon out of hell itself.

“Likely just a cat,” Cuthbert told her, as if she would be reassured that it was  _ only _ a wildcat up there. “They sound bigger than they are and scare easy. I shan’t leave you undefended, worry not.”

What that meant, it turned out, was that he would gather her up a goodly pile of stones. Heavy stones, true, some quite satisfyingly jagged, all good for throwing, but still just stones. Odetta almost didn’t ask, but then, as he was cooking the both of them dinner - a double portion for her, so she wouldn’t go hungry while he was gone - the cat screamed again, closer than before, and her nerve didn’t break, exactly, but perhaps bent.

“Are you going to leave me a gun?” she asked, hating the way it came out. She wanted to sound offhand, casual, unconcerned with whether he would or not. To her own ear, though, she sounded mostly worried.

“No, my lady, I’m not.” He had the grace to at least look and sound a little apologetic about it. 

“ _ He  _ doesn’t want you to,” Odetta said. “Isn’t that right?” Why that might be, she didn’t know, but she knew it was true. Roland didn’t want her armed, and what Roland said, Cuthbert did.  _ When that Really Bad Man says jump _ , that derisive voice that had spoken up earlier said in the back of her mind,  _ this boy’s in the air before he asks how high. _

“True enough,” Cuthbert admitted. “Do’ee even know how to use a gun?”

“No. Probably,” she said with a rueful little laugh, “if something did come at me and I had one, I’d just end up shooting myself with it. Or throwing it at the thing instead.”

“I thought perhaps ‘twas so.” There was something in his face, though, some carefully constructed blankness, some watchful gleam in his eye as he looked at her - did he think she was lying? Why did he  _ look _ at her like that, as if at any moment he expected her to - to do something strange? “You’ll not be bothered by the cats, I don’t think. They’re like to be smaller than you are, and won’t prey on anything larger than themselves unless it’s - unless they’re very desperate.”

_ Unless it’s crippled _ , she thought he had probably been about to say. Unless they knew it couldn’t run away from them.

“I know,” she said. The screaming cat made her nervous - how could it not, when it sounded so terrible, so much like someone being killed? - but there was something else, something she couldn’t name. She didn’t want to be left alone here. She still didn’t trust Cuthbert, but she didn’t want him to leave her. “I’ll be fine. I can tell you want to get on and go to him, so go. Don’t worry about me.”

And as it turned out, the cat didn’t trouble her at all. As it turned out, quite shortly after he left, she became the most dangerous thing on that lonely stretch of beach by far.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short one this time! Things are ramping up. I'm officially done with the Drawing part of this rewrite and heading into Waste Lands. See you there!

Cuthbert ran. With the chair unoccupied he fair flew across the sand, feet pounding, heart racing, lungs pumping like bellows in his chest. The sliver of Alain’s awareness in his mind picked up on his concern, the naked fear he allowed himself to feel now that the woman was no longer with him.

_ Roland _ , he sent back, and with it an image of their dinh as he’d last seen him: pallid and slick with fever-sweat, gaunt and trembling, his glittering eyes sunk back into their sockets like a corpse’s. 

Wordless dismay washed over him. He responded with reassurance, though it was hard when he himself was so worried.  _ There’s medicine beyond that door _ , he told Alain, and tried not to transmit any of his own doubts. Eddie had brought back items from his own world through his own door, not just once but several times. Eddie had brought back the medicine which had nearly made Roland well before. Surely the third -  **THE PUSHER** \- would know how to acquire more of it.

And he ran, the wind howling through the spokes of the chair’s wheels so that he imagined himself surrounded by a pack of wailing ghosts.

\---

A reedy, unearthly wailing sound started up and rapidly got louder. It jerked Eddie out of his uneasy doze, and for a second he was sure it was some kind of demon bearing down on them. Then he saw the figure in the distance, getting closer, and realized that it was just Cuthbert coming back with the chair.

“And just in time, too,” he muttered under his breath. The last couple of days with Roland had not exactly been a fun vacation. Every time he slept he woke up fully expecting to see that the guy had kicked the bucket in his sleep, and he dreaded having to explain that when Cuthbert came back. He’d imagined vividly, over and over again, the look on Cuthbert’s face when he came back and saw Roland’s wasted body laying there, a sheet over his face so Eddie didn’t have to  _ look _ at it, and Eddie trying to lamely explain how he just hadn’t been able to do anything, Roland had just been so sick…

Speaking of - he reached over and gave Roland’s bony shoulder, burning unpleasantly hot even through his shirt, a shake. Groaning faintly, Roland swatted at him and sat up.

“I hear it,” Roland said in a tone of voice bordering on grouchy. He opened his eyes just a slit, squinting out at Cuthbert as he came racing up and stopped.

“Then let’s get up and at ‘em, yeah?” 

“That,” Cuthbert panted, “sounds like an excellent idea. You don’t half look a corpse, Ro. Let’s get a move on.”

“No,” Roland said. “You come sit down, Bert, before you fall down.”

Cuthbert did come sit, though with a stubborn look on his face that Eddie recognized well enough - he knew how it felt just fine to be wearing that look. “I’ll take a rest, but -”

“You’ll sleep,” Roland said firmly. “I’ll make it an order if I have to, but I’d rather you simply see sense. You’ve made good time, and I’m in no more hurry to die on this forsaken beach than you are for me to, but you won’t do any of us any good wearing yourself out.” His voice was a hoarse whisper, but rock solid.

“I’m not used up yet,” Cuthbert protested, “and when I’m too tired, Eddie can push.”

“You and Eddie will both sleep, and I’ll wake you when it’s dark. Then we’ll go on.” And that, clearly, was that.

Cuthbert dropped off into sleep like a stone down a well as soon as he laid down. Eddie lay awake a while longer, eyes squeezed shut, willing himself to rest, unable to stop thinking of Odetta all by herself out there armed with only…

Something nagged at him. He kept picturing Cuthbert coming back, Cuthbert standing there panting beside that empty wheelchair. What about the image disturbed him he couldn’t say, but it stuck stubbornly around.

Finally he sat up and looked at the guy. There he was, curled up on one side on the sand, looking just the same as ever. Eddie ran his gaze down the man’s body. It stopped suddenly on his belts - both gunbelts strapped around his waist still, the holster Eddie could see full, and he was sure the one he couldn’t was as well.

Furious heat rose up his neck to his face. The pounding in his ears might have still been the surf, but it might have been the beat of his heart, the beat of hot blood in his veins.

“You weaselly little fuck,” he snarled, and lunged.

“Eddie -” Roland started to say, alarmed, but Eddie paid him no mind.

As soon as Eddie touched him, Cuthbert burst into motion, trying to roll out from under him and sit up. He’d been asleep or nearly there, though, so by the time he felt anything Eddie was on top of him, and with strength borne of fury he pushed Cuthbert down flat on his back and sat on his chest, pinning him.

“You left her alone there!” Eddie yelled down into his stunned face. “You left her there without fuckin’ anything!”

Cuthbert stared up at him, his one eye very wide. His chest rose and fell rapidly beneath Eddie. When he spoke, though, his voice was very even. “Get off of me right now, or I’m going to hurt you.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie spat. He grabbed a handful of Cuthbert’s hair - whether he planned to slam the guy’s head into the ground a couple times or just give his hair a good hard yank even he wasn’t sure, and he never got a chance to find out.

Fast as a striking snake, Cuthbert turned and sank his teeth into the tender flesh of Eddie’s inner arm. When Eddie reared back, two things happened very quickly.

The first was that Cuthbert slammed the heel of one palm into Eddie’s solar plexus, winding him. While he fought to pull in a breath, fought against the stunned muscles of his diaphragm and the screaming terror of  _ not being able to breathe, _ Cuthbert reached up and cupped the back of his head. It was almost tender, like he was going to draw Eddie in for a kiss.

What he did was jerk Eddie’s head down while snapping his own up. His forehead crashed into the middle of Eddie’s face. Pain exploded in a white flash across his vision.

Still holding onto Eddie’s head, Cuthbert flipped the two of them. His hand made a bony cushion between Eddie’s skull and the hard, stony ground, but the impact knocked what little breath he’d managed to regain back out of him. Then Cuthbert’s weight settled firmly across his ribs.

“Fuck,” Eddie wheezed spitefully up at him. “You.” He raised his hands and weakly pushed at the man.

Cuthbert grabbed both his wrists and wrenched his hands down to the ground, up above his head. “Are you done?” he asked, almost pleasantly.

Eddie thought of spitting up into his face - he was close enough, bent in a long arch over Eddie in a horrible facsimile of intimacy, loose hair escaped from its tie falling down in a ragged curtain around the both of them, blowing in the fitful breeze - and decided against it. The guy was clearly pissed. So was Eddie, but he didn’t want to get his ass beat by an old man.

“You left her,” he said again, hoarse and breathless. “You left Odetta up there without anything to protect herself from - from whatever might be out there, man. Those lobster things -”

“She’s well above the tide line.”

“- one of those big fuckin’ cats, whatever kinda crazy shit you guys got out here - Christ, did you leave her with  _ anything?” _

“I gave her a pile of stones.”

“Stones!” Eddie thumped his head back against the sand with a humorless bark of laughter. “Jesus fuckin’ wept, what’s wrong with you?”

“The  _ other _ woman in her nearly brained you, Eddie,” Cuthbert said. “And she only did that because she couldn’t shoot you first. Have you perhaps forgotten that? Did she knock your wits loose to run out your ear? What sort of fool do you think me, to leave live iron in the hands of such a woman? Perhaps you wish to be shot, but I’ve taken enough bullets for a lifetime, and I’ll be damned if the one that kills me comes from my own fucking gun.”

He let go of Eddie’s wrists and sat back, tense and ready to strike again if Eddie made a move. There was a little jagged nick in his forehead, probably from one of Eddie's teeth. A thin trickle of blood oozed down from it.

“Get off me, man,” Eddie said dully. “I can’t breathe.”

Cuthbert hesitated a moment, then climbed off him. Eddie sat up, rubbing his wrists, then reached up to gingerly touch his nose, which felt like it had swollen up to approximately the size of a blimp. His fingers came away wet.

“Whatever excuses you wanna make, it wasn’t right.” He looked hard at Cuthbert, then shifted his gaze to Roland, who was watching with vague interest. Like this was all just some show to him. “And maybe he’s making the excuses, but it was your idea, wasn’t it, King Shithead?”

“She’s dangerous,” Roland said.

“Christ! She’s just a lady with no fuckin’ legs! Are you both really that scared of her? I thought you guys were, you know, all big and bad.” He turned his head and spat into the sand. It came out pink. Probably his lip was busted, too. “That’s why you sent your buddy, isn’t it? Because you knew he’d leave a crippled lady all by herself on a beach full of monsters if you told him to.”

“I sent Cuthbert,” Roland started, and then broke off in a fit of coughing. For the last two days Eddie had listened to that cough getting worse with growing worry. Now he hoped vengefully that Roland coughed a rib out of joint. “I sent Cuthbert,” he finally said, in a bare whisper, when the fit was past, “because I know he’s smart enough not to arm a woman who’d gladly see all three of us dead.”

“You don’t even know Detta will come back! You  _ don’t know that!” _ But neither of them bought that, Eddie could see just from looking at them.

And wasn’t Eddie afraid of that very thing? Didn’t he want to go to her as fast as possible because he felt that, somehow, by keeping her in sight he could keep the woman he cared for in control and keep away the other?

“Every moment you delay us, she’s out there longer,” Roland pointed out implacably.

“Fuck you,” Eddie said, but there was no force behind it. “Man, fuck both of you. Whatever.”

\---

Roland was far heavier and less helpful as a passenger than Odetta, but with the two of them pushing, they still made good time. Tense silence settled between the three of them, broken only by the sound of the waves and wind and the pop and grit of the chair’s wheels along the ground.

When the first light of dawn began to touch the sky, Roland called a halt. Eddie wanted to object - he was tired but not done in, not yet - but then he looked at Cuthbert and bit his tongue. He had no kindly feelings towards the man just then, but it was plain to see he was dead on his feet, pallid and staring vaguely at nothing from an eye sunk deep into an exhaustion-bruised socket. If they went much further, even if he wasn’t pushing, he was just going to fall right down on the beach. 

They slept until noon or so - the sun was wallowing around in the sky again, and Eddie hated to look at it, but noon seemed about right - and then kept going. That night, while they ate, Cuthbert spoke up.

“We’re close,” he said. “Reach it early tomorrow, I wot.” Then he laid down, and as far as Eddie could tell, was off to sleep at once.

Eddie slept more poorly. He’d thought maybe knowing that would soothe him - probably Cuthbert had thought so too, there’d been something of a peace offering in his tone - but his mind just fixed on the idea that Odetta was only a few hours away and wouldn’t let it go. Just a few hours, just a long walk. They could do it right then and sleep when they’d arrived. Eddie could let the gunslingers sleep and do it himself and let them catch up.

That thought began to play in his head like a picture: getting up and slipping quietly away, leaving the two of them the chair, of course, and just walking leisurely along the moonlit beach until he reached the door. Odetta would be there, frightened after being on her own for the last couple of days but unharmed, and she’d be so grateful that he’d come, and maybe she’d ask where the other two were - although he got the idea she didn’t like them much, which was fair, because he didn’t either - and he would explain that he’d just been so worried about her he’d needed to come see her sooner, that they were on their way, and maybe she’d embrace him and maybe she’d even kiss him… And when Roland and Cuthbert came up, of course, he’d say he was sorry, but he figured they could handle themselves over the last few miles and he just  _ needed _ to see her, he’d really  _ needed _ to, and look, nothing bad had happened… And maybe they’d even feel a little bad for having left her when Detta was gone and everything was fine…

It was that image he finally drifted off to, of telling them everything was fine and the two of them agreeing that it was so, all was well and all manner of things were well.

\---

They did reach the door before noon the next day. Eddie was pushing and he put on a burst of joyous speed when they got up close. Cuthbert plodded along somewhat behind, unwilling to rush to what he already knew was going to be a bad scene. He’d seen what Eddie either hadn’t noticed or didn’t want to  _ know  _ he’d noticed: the door stood there just as it had when he’d left, but of the woman there was no sign.

Eddie noticed quickly enough. He came to a stop in front of the door, cast around for some sight of Odetta, and then when his brain finally realized what certainly his eyes had known for the last twenty minutes of their approach, began hollering her name. No reply came back to him save the booming of the waves as they ate into the rock of the hills.

Cuthbert came up beside Roland and put a hand on his shoulder. It could not be likened to touching a corpse only because no corpse Cuthbert had encountered - and he had encountered a great many of them in his time - ever burned with such a sickly heat. The bone pushed sharply up into Cuthbert’s palm as if the only thing between it and Cuthbert’s hand was the thickness of Roland’s shirt. Roland took no notice of him; Roland was studying the door with near-delirious fascination.

“Do you know what it means?” Cuthbert asked quietly. He kept swinging his head from side to side, looking now at Roland beside him, now over at Eddie as Eddie circled the barren stretch of beach they’d fetched up upon. 

“Death,” said Roland in a vague whisper. “It means death.”

Eddie’s steady calling grew farther away. They both looked over to see him clambering up the nearest low hill, hands cupped around his mouth as he yelled for Odetta.

For a moment, Roland did not speak. He drew in a breath, then let it out in a trembling sigh. His whole body shook under Cuthbert’s hand, shook and shivered while that unholy baking heat rolled off him. Never before had he seen Roland so close to the edge of giving in. Worry filled him, and not all his own, either. Alain looked out through his eyes and saw the state their dinh was in, and though he knew as well as Cuthbert did that he was too far away to give any aid - just as he’d known when he’d sent Cuthbert on that he wouldn’t be able to help - he couldn’t help his concern.

Then Roland said, “Stop him.”

Cuthbert went trotting smartly after Eddie. A prudent few feet below the man he stopped, put his hands to his mouth, and called out in a commanding tone, “Eddie! Stop a moment, will you?”

Eddie halted and turned to look down at him. There was no real anger in his gaze, as Cuthbert had feared, but what was there was perhaps worse. He was very frightened for the woman and very distracted in his fright, and Cuthbert suspected already there would be no reasoning with him. “What?” Eddie asked impatiently. “Go on, door’s right there, he knows what to do.”

“He wishes to speak with you,” Cuthbert said. Why, he wasn’t sure himself. Might be it was just that Roland wanted to keep Eddie nearby. He wasn’t wild about letting Eddie go wandering off into the hills after the woman himself, not when it was so likely she was the other one now.

“Well, we can talk later. I’ve got to find her.” And with that Eddie turned away and started back up the hill.

After their tussle the other day, Cuthbert wasn’t much interested in fighting Eddie again. There was no doubt he was the stronger of the two, and far more experienced in hand-to-hand combat, but that wasn’t how he liked to solve his problems. And if Roland was to be believed, Eddie - and Odetta - was an integral part of their quest, and they’d have to spend a good long while in each other’s company. Gods knew he’d fought often enough with Roland, and even come to blows a time or two, but too much of such a thing early on would sour whatever relationship he and Eddie might be able to build.

Still, he had been told to stop Eddie. So he went scrambling up the hill and snatched at him, snagging him by one wrist. Eddie rounded on him, starting to look angry now, but he didn’t try to wrench away or throw a punch.

“Come on, man,” Eddie said in a tone of such reason, as if he couldn’t quite believe he was even having to argue his case. “She could be lying up there dead or hurt. I have to find her, I’ve  _ got _ to. I’ll come talk about whatever you guys want after I find her.”

“She’s not dead,” Cuthbert said, “and she isn’t hurt. What she  _ is _ -”

“You don’t know that!” Now Eddie was starting to sound mad. His eyes stared desperately out from his pale face, begging for Cuthbert to understand. “Maybe one of those cats we heard came down and got her, like, dragged her off!”

“Had a cat gotten at her, we’d have found an almighty mess,” Cuthbert said, pulling Eddie in a little closer. “I’ve seen plenty of cat-kill, I have, and they aren’t neat about it. I don’t see so much as a smear of blood, do you? Nothing carried her off, Eddie, save for the other who lives inside her.”

“You don’t  _ know _ that.” But it was clear enough in his eyes that even though his mouth denied it, his mind knew and believed it.

“I know nothing got at her, for there’s no sign. I know that if she were dead, that door would not be standing there. You and Roland both have attested to that. You’re not a stupid man, Eddie, so use your brain. There’s a hundred hiding places in those hills for her, and if you go blundering off after her, you’re only going to get  _ yourself _ hurt. Now -” he gave Eddie another gentle tug - “come down here and speak with Roland, and we’ll work out what to do about her.”

“Stop fuckin’ pullin’ on me,” Eddie snapped. He yanked his arm back. Cuthbert let him go, for if Eddie tried to bolt he was close enough to go after him… but he didn’t think Eddie would. He thought that, at least for the moment, Eddie would humor him enough to come down and speak with Roland. “You know, it’s real like, unseemly, how far up your ass he’s got his hand.”

“I don’t know that I take your meaning, Eddie. Do you accuse me of being his catamite?” Cuthbert asked mildly. He’d been called worse, for a surety. 

“I don’t know what  _ that _ means, but what I’m sayin’ is you’re a fuckin’ puppet.” Eddie shouldered past him and went down the hill, though not quite all the way up to Roland. He stopped a good couple of yards away and crossed his arms over his chest, every line of him saying that he’d listen, sure… and then he’d do what he wanted to do.

“Eddie,” Roland called out, trying to put as much strength into his voice as he could. “Won’t you come a little closer? I want to speak with you, and I can’t shout for long.”

Eddie didn’t budge. “I think this is just fine. What do you want?”

“I want -” He broke away into a fit of coughing. It was an ugly cough that rattled unpleasantly in his chest, and Cuthbert could tell by the way he curled in on himself that it hurt him. No doubt he’d sprung the muscles of his chest, perhaps even pushed a rib or two out of joint. “I want you to come with me this time, Eddie.”

Eddie jerked as if stung. Then he began to laugh. It was a flat and humorless sound, as ugly in its own way as Roland’s coughing. “You want - Christ on a cracker, man! You want me to come  _ with _ you? Last time your buddy here practically broke my arm to keep me here, but now that I actually have a reason to stay, you want me to come with you? Fuck you.”

“See sense, Eddie,” Roland said. “I know you’re worried about her, but I’m trying to protect you.”

“Oh, yeah, you’re real concerned about all of us, huh?” Eddie jeered. “You’re just so fuckin’ altruistic, right? You just  _ care _ so  _ much _ . If you think I’m buying that, buddy, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.”

“If you would believe a selfish reason, I can give you one. I need you -  _ both _ of you, Eddie. I don’t want any harm to come to her any more than I want it to come to you.” Roland cleared his throat, then spat a wad of thick phlegm to the side. “I would have thought you’d like a chance to see your world once more.”

Eddie put his hands on his hips. “You really think I’m that dumb, don’t you?” he asked, with a sort of disgusted amazement. “You think I’d just leave her out here without even checking to see if she’s okay because you offered me a chance at some Earth take-out? You manipulative son of a bitch -”

“I’m beginning to think you are,” Roland interrupted. His voice was fading fast, but it still cut through whatever diatribe Eddie was working up to. “You know there’s nothing wrong with her, just as I do, just as Cuthbert told you. Nothing except for the fact that she isn’t Odetta anymore.”

“Okay,” Eddie said, “I mean, even if she  _ is _ Detta now, even if she  _ is _ that nasty bitch, are we just gonna leave her alone out there? You’re just as fucked if a cat eats her whether she’s the good witch or the bad one, right?”

“That’s right,” Roland said.

“So someone needs to  _ look _ for her! We gotta find her either way! And she doesn’t have a weapon, right, because your shithead buddy here left her with a bunch of Christing  _ rocks _ , so what’s she gonna do? Chew my ankles off?” Gradually Eddie’s voice rose until he was shouting. “Why don’t you just go on through the fuckin’ door and drag the last poor asshole out here and let me look for her?”

“Because what she can  _ do _ ,” Roland said, voice cracking as sharply as he could make it, “is lay up and wait for you and trip you and then brain you with a rock, or bash your ribs in, or push you into one of yon ravines to die leg-broke with flies eating your gods-be-damned  _ eyes _ , and even if Cuthbert managed to get to you in time to keep you alive you’d be a cripple. Is that what you want, Eddie?”

The two of them stared at each other across the gulf between them - not just physical distance, but the gulf of their differences, the gulf of Eddie’s growing infatuation and Roland’s frustration, neither willing to back down or say the next word.

Seeing that this was simply going to escalate - perhaps to the point of blows, perhaps simply until Eddie turned and walked off into the scrubby hills - Cuthbert stepped in and cleared his throat. “Eddie,” he said soothingly, “we mean to look for her, of course. If you go through with Roland and help him find what he needs to be well again, the sooner you can come back and we can search for her. There’s not like to be any cats out hunting in the middle of the day, and the woman is canny. She’ll have found a good place to lay up. Going out alone after her won’t help anything.”

Eddie’s jaw worked and his fists clenched. For a time Cuthbert was sure the man would round on him swinging, or at the very least give him a tongue lashing. He simply looked between the two of them, though, jaw working like he was grinding his teeth, and then heaved a huge and defeated sigh.

“Fine,” he said. “Fine. I won’t go out after her. I’m not going with you, though. You can just take that idea and shove it right up your happy ass. You go in yourself and get what you need, and I’m gonna stay here in case she  _ does _ call out for help.”

“Cuthbert -” Roland started to say.

“ _ Cuthbert _ ,” Eddie broke in, savagely mocking, “left her sitting here with a pile of rocks. And, you know what? I seem to remember it sure took  _ Cuthbert _ a damn long time to get off his ass and come help when Detta nearly bashed my brains in that first time, and he was supposed to be standing watch, right? You still got both ears, buddy, so what’s up with that, huh?” When no answer to that was forthcoming, he went on. “No, I think that he wouldn’t move his pretty ass if he heard her hollering up there unless you said so, and you’ll be incommunicado, won’t you? So no, I’ll stay here, just in case the lady needs help.”

It was clear that he would budge no further. Roland looked at him a long time, then nodded to himself. “Alright,” he said, again more to himself than to either of the other two. “I can’t force you.” He rose ponderously from the chair, tottering and nearly falling as it slid back beneath him, and stepped up to the door. “But you be on your guard, Eddie. Don’t go haring off after her. That lesson that night was for your benefit, and I hope you’ve learned it.”

And with that, he grasped the handle of the door and turned it.


	8. Chapter 8

Just like before, his body collapsed. Throwing a wary glance at Eddie, Cuthbert went over and arranged him more gracefully, so that he was at least lying flat and not all a-sprawl in the sand.

“That was clever of you to notice,” he said once he’d seen to Roland. He hadn’t thought that Eddie would remember much of that night aside from the screaming and the pain, but clearly he’d been wrong. More and more he came to agree with Roland’s assessment: there was a fine gunslinger buried in this man.   


“I was just thinking about it,” Eddie said bitterly. “The other night when you came back with the chair, I started thinking about it. You guys have a hell of a thing going on here. It’s like good cop, bad cop, except you’re both playing the batshit insane cop.” He brooded on that observation in silence for a time, and then came out with, plaintively, “Why do you do it? No offense, but Roland’s just an asshole. You seem like maybe there’s a decent guy buried somewhere in there. So what’re you doing shoveling his shit for?”

Cuthbert lowered himself to sit cross-legged beside Roland’s unoccupied body. “Well,” he said, “I suppose because I’ve been doing it all our lives. The Tower is his ka, and following him to it seems to be mine, and in the meantime…” He paused, struggling to put it into words. Usually that was not a task he had trouble with, but the difficulty here was so much more than just a matter of finding the correct words to say. A man from his own world might have understood what it meant to be Roland’s second, to be his strong right arm, to serve the last of the line of Eld, the man who had been - ever so briefly - the dinh of long lost Gilead before it fell. To Eddie, that was all so much meaningless claptrap.   


“We are ka-tet,” he went on, slowly, testing the words as he spoke them, “Roland and I. And Alain, who you haven’t met, and I suppose now you and Odetta as well. That means one from many. It means a group who are destined to be together to perform some task. It means that we each fill in for what the others lack, do you understand that?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, “I get you.” He still stood warily away, far enough that Cuthbert couldn’t easily grab him, but he was at least listening.

“You don’t have a very kindly view of Roland, and -” he held up a hand to forestall any protest - “I understand that. He’s a difficult man to love even at the best of times, and you could hardly have met him at a worse one. He cares, though he has great difficulty showing it. He isn’t good with people, Eddie, not really. I am. I don’t say this to make you love him, nor soften your view on him, simply so you understand that neither of us has lied to or mislead you. Nothing I’ve said to you about what he means or intends has been untrue. Saying a thing in a gentler way isn’t the same as twisting it.”

“God,” Eddie muttered, scrubbing a hand down his face, “you’re wasted here in the cowboy apocalypse, you know that? You shoulda been a politician or gone into advertising or something. You’d be a hell of a PR man. I know you don’t know what that means, it doesn’t matter.”

“Will you come sit with me?” Cuthbert patted the ground beside him. For a moment Eddie wavered, but then his expression hardened up again. “If you’re set on leaving, will you at least wait a moment?”

_ Can you touch her? Tell if she’s conscious or not, or which one she is? _ It was a stretch, he knew, and likely wouldn’t make any difference, but -

The quiet little tendril of Alain’s consciousness nestled within his mind abruptly grew. He felt it usually as he might the lightest touch of a hand on his shoulder. Now the hand grasped him, squeezing hard, and pulled him aside so that he was the smaller presence in his own mind, pressed to the very edges of it by Alain. Then Alain’s consciousness departed, spreading out to feel for the woman, drawing off Cuthbert’s strength to see so far.

He received not words nor precisely an image, but a quick and glancing impression: a snug dark space, the steady roar of the tide, watchfulness, readiness, a mind like a trap coiled and ready to spring, a mind that felt the invading touch of another consciousness brushing across it and lashed furiously out -

Abruptly Alain was all the way gone, and Cuthbert was alone in his own head, feeling rather too small for his skull. Eddie’s face filled his field of vision, at a strange angle - and then he realized he was lying flat on his back.

“What the fuck was that?” Eddie asked.

Cuthbert grinned woozily up at him. “Worried, were you? Alain is close enough to touch my mind here, so I thought I’d have him see if he could find your woman.”

Eddie’s face went red. “She’s not -”

Cuthbert sat up, waving away his protests. “She’s alive and well and lying in wait. The other is in control, no doubt. She’s got a mind like a beartrap, that woman!” He studied Eddie, who had shifted back out of grabbing range as soon as he was sure Cuthbert hadn’t keeled over dead. “Now you know, Eddie. What awaits you in those hills is only trouble. Won’t you stay here instead?”

Again, he saw Eddie think it over and then convince himself against it. He shook his head. “No. Nah. I guess you’re trying to be straight with me as much as you can, and I guess you’re probably right about Odetta -”

“ _ Probably?” _

“- but I’m not gonna sit here while she might be up there about to get pounced on or something because, no offense, your invisible friend says so.” Eddie raised his chin up, looking defiantly - and with more than a little embarrassment - down his nose at Cuthbert. “A lotta weird shit has happened, so I’m not gonna say I totally don’t buy that your psychic buddy is hanging out in your head right now calling me an asshole, but let’s say I’m on the installment plan, okay? Thanks for the warning and all, I’ll keep it in mind, but I’m still gonna look.”

Roland wouldn’t like it. Had Roland been there, perhaps he would have told Cuthbert to fetch Eddie back, to tie him into the chair if need be. Roland wasn’t, though, and Cuthbert was tired. Nor did he want to leave Roland’s body unattended. A vision came to him, simple and terrible in its plausibility: that while he hied off after Eddie, Detta might come slithering down out of the hills where she was laid up and bash in Roland’s unconscious head, or slit his throat, or simply cover his nose and mouth until his raspy, uneven breathing stopped.

“Go,” Cuthbert said, and waved a hand as if to shoo Eddie off like a troublesome fly. “But know if you come to mischief, I shan’t come running to help you.”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks.” As heated as his words had been earlier, there was a pathetic gratefulness in Eddie’s voice. He was well and truly falling for the woman, based on nothing more than a few hours of conversation. “Give me like, an hour, okay? If I don’t see anything, her or any - anything, I’ll come back and we can wait for Roland.”

Cuthbert simply waved him away once more.

Eddie pelted off into the hills, calling once more. Cuthbert sat and watched the door and Roland’s body. After a time, Alain came winding back into his mind, and he watched as well through Cuthbert’s eyes. That, at least, was simple and easy still.

\---

Some eternally optimistic part of him had hoped that maybe Eddie  _ would _ find her and bring her back, whichever woman she happened to be at the time. It would certainly make things a lot easier for all of them if she were where they could see her. Whatever wonders the world beyond the door held - and there were marvels aplenty, so many that he almost forgot to worry while watching them - he doubted the medicine would cure Roland right away, which meant it would still come down to Cuthbert and Eddie to find the damn woman.   


An hour crawled by. Eddie ranged up and down the low hills, blundering through tangles of scrub brush and thorns, calling Odetta’s name out ceaselessly. Cuthbert glanced that way from time to time, but mostly kept his gaze focused on the door. He was very tired, and the shifting clamor of the world beyond the door kept his attention better than the unchanging hills.

Still, he drifted. He was halfway to sleep when a hoarse shout startled him back awake. Nerves all a-jangle, he listened, straining to hear more. For a time there was nothing else, and he began to imagine he’d dreamt it… but then he realized he heard nothing, not even Eddie calling Odetta’s name.

Cuthbert sighed. He drew in a deep breath, scrubbed his hands down his face, and let out a stream of eloquent cursing. One hardly needed any brains at all to know what  _ that  _ meant.

Still, he stood and cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered Eddie’s name towards the hills. Just as he’d thought, there was no response.

Which left him caught between a rock and a hard place, it surely did. He’d told Eddie he wouldn’t come pull his chestnuts from the fire, should they fall in, and he’d meant it - going after Eddie would mean leaving Roland’s unconscious body all on its lonesome, where anything might happen. With a shiver, he recalled the vision of Detta sneaking down to slit Roland’s defenseless throat.

But the truth was that they needed Eddie as well. Should the woman kill him, the door would go and Roland would be trapped on the other side, in some other man’s body. The body on their side of the door would become so much meat, on the very verge of spoiling.

What he _ ought  _ to do, what Roland would have told him to do and Alain would likely have done without being told, was wait for Roland to come back through. Even ill as he was, he would be able to defend himself, and then Cuthbert could go hie off after Eddie and the woman without fear. He’d simply need to be patient and trust that whatever nastiness Detta had in mind didn’t include a quick death for Eddie.

“Well,” he said aloud to himself, “I’ve never been a patient fellow.”

But because he wasn’t completely soft-witted, he did reach for Alain within his mind to ask,  _ Can you watch over him? _

Regret, unease, disapproval.  _ No. His mind isn’t here. There’s nothing to touch. It’s like he’s dead. You shouldn’t go. _

“I can’t stay, either,” Cuthbert said. He made sure Roland was laid out as comfortably as could be, then started to go. Then he turned back.

What would happen would happen, but no need to help the worst along. With a muttered apology, Cuthbert bent and unstrapped Roland’s guns from around his waist and stowed them in his own pack. Should Roland live to be cross with him for it later, he’d account that justification enough for having done it in the first place.

Then he headed out into the hills, towards the place where Eddie’s cry had come from.

\---

Laid up where she was, Detta hadn’t been able to witness the brief, aborted fight between Eddie and Cuthbert. If she had, she would have laughed fit to split to see those nasty men at each other’s throats.  _ Bet you boys miss me now, _ she might have said.  _ Bet you miss havin’ poor crippled Detta around to hurt on. Bet it ain’t fun no more with just the three of you. _

She could almost feel the tension between them when they finally rolled onto the stretch of beach which her hideout overlooked, though. She could almost taste it, and it tasted fine indeed.

When the baby-ass white boy started to run off into the hills, hollering that other name, and the grinning jackal pretty-boy went after him, she went tense all over, quivering with expectation. If the pretty-boy  _ grabbed _ the white boy, she was pretty sure there’d be a fight. Right then there wasn’t anything in the whole world that sounded sweeter to Detta than watching those two men slap at each other.   


It didn’t come to that, though. Pretty-boy talked a little, and the baby-ass white boy came down to talk with the Really Bad Man.

The Really Bad Man, she saw plain enough, was the Really Sick Man now. He slumped in the wheelchair -  _ her _ wheelchair, but pretty-boy had dumped her out and left her, yes he had, and took her chair back for his butt-buddy - like he couldn’t even shift his own weight anymore. Still, he had both of the other two in thrall.   


Whatever they might have said between them, she couldn’t hear, but that was fine. She knew what it was  _ about _ . The Really Badly Sick Man didn’t want Eddie haring off after her, and when he said  _ heel _ , well, they both came and sat, didn’t they? Sure did.

That was fine. She could wait. She’d waited long enough, hadn’t she? Sure had. She’d been dragged up the beach by that grinning pretty-boy, and kept all quiet and good for him the whole way, ‘til they’d reached the door and he’d tried to give her a pokin’. Then she’d laid down the law of Detta Walker for him.

Tried to put it in her mouth, and she’d told him she’d bite the little thing off. Tried to hold her down and give it to her anyway and she’d fought him, yes she had, until finally he’d just gotten up and done his pants back up and left her alone on the beach and gone back to his buddies. Tipped her onto the sand to try and poke her and then left her to drag herself up away from the monsters when she wouldn’t let him.

And now it looked like his main squeeze wasn’t in much mood for pokin’ either.

So she’d waited, and watched, and when she knew they were coming back she’d gone up into the hills and found this place. It wasn’t really a cave, just a narrow space where two rocks leaned together, full of tiny old bones.   


She laid up there, and watched them, and waited.

Finally, the Really Bad Man went through the door. The other two sat and jawed some more, and then something happened that put a fright into her.

All of a sudden, someone  _ touched _ her. She was alone, there was no way anyone could have snuck up on her, but all the same  _ someone touched her. _ Cold fingers stroked the nape of her neck.

It felt too much like -  _ what? nothing!  _ \- something bad. Like how the pretty-boy had touched her the other night, gentle enough until he felt like hurting. Like when the Really Bad Man had come bursting into her mind and stolen her body, and  _ that  _ had been bad because it felt like something  _ else _ bad, something familiar -

Detta shook herself and flung that prying touch off with a soundless mental bellow of fury and horror. There’d been no fighting the Really Bad Man, but he’d been  _ in _ her. This outside presence was no more than a touch, and she threw it off with ease.

That the Really Bad Man was responsible, she had no doubt. It was his friend, the one they’d talked about who could get all in her head. They hadn’t thought she could hear, but she had. They were taking her to him so he could stick his fingers in her mind and make her obedient. They were close, and now he was trying to get at her.

She was so caught up in her anger and disgust - and the deep unease she felt at what a familiar violation it was - that she almost didn’t notice when the white boy left and started climbing around in the hills, hollering.

When she noticed, though, it took the edge right off her mood. She’d thought maybe she’d have to wait until they went to sleep and come up all sneaky-like on them, but here this dumb little white boy was coming to her instead! The Really Bad Man wouldn’t have allowed it, because he was a sly motherfucker, but he was gone.   


Eddie went back and forth in front of her spot more than once, close enough for her to reach out and grab. She kept her eye on the pretty-boy, though. The pretty-boy looked  _ tired. _   


Finally, her chance came. Eddie wandered by and this time she did reach out and grab him. She yanked hard, then let go and came slithering out to get on top of him and keep him quiet.

He got off one shout, and then she got her hand over his mouth. Eyes wide with panic, he bucked and jerked under her, but she clamped her thighs around his chest and held on.

“Ride ‘em, cowboy,” she hissed gleefully down at him. “Thought you was gonna be ridin’ me, huh? Your pretty friend down there tried that too, you just ask him how it turned out.” With her other hand, she pinched his nose shut.

That  _ really _ got him moving. He flailed and flopped around like a fish out of water, but his struggles grew weaker and weaker. Finally he stopped completely.

Detta thought about holding on until he died. Thought long and hard on it, as a matter of fact. That earlier invasion still had her hackles up, as did what had happened during the couple of days she’d spent alone with the pretty-boy. Taking it out on the little man she had in her grasp sounded mighty fine.

But then the thought came that if she did, the Really Bad Man might know. He needed this pansy-ass white boy. Why, she could only guess, but he clearly did. If she killed Eddie and took away that Really Bad Man’s chance at whatever it was he needed Eddie for, well, she thought maybe what she’d been through up until then would look like a seaside vacation compared to what he’d do to her.

How would he know? She couldn’t say, but she thought he would all the same. Might even be he’d told his pretty-boy buddy to let Eddie go and draw her out.

Slowly, she eased up. Eddie’s chest stayed still, and for just a second fear flashed through her - but then he took in a ragged breath, and another.

He’d yelled out before she’d gotten him. Pretty-boy had looked pretty drowsy, but pretty-boy was mighty clever too, maybe even smarter than the Really Bad Man. If Eddie was bait, he’d come looking for her. She did not intend to be there when he came.

No, she decided, looking down at the lay of the beach and the two men still there. She did not intend that at all.

\---

The land where he and Alain had made their home was gentler, not so buckled and badly fissured, but similar enough that Cuthbert moved with easy familiarity through the foothills. He kept on the up side of the frequent ravines, for he knew all too well how easy it was to walk into one thinking it let out on the other side, and find oneself abruptly trapped in a narrow hallway with high stone walls on either side and no idea what the last three turns one had taken were. Most of them were too small for a man to walk through anyway, even as narrow and skinny as man as himself. The larger ones he kept out of all the same. He slid deftly through tangles of scrub brush, glad for the protection his jeans offered from the grasping thorns.

He hadn’t Alain’s talent for tracking, but he hardly needed it. Eddie had left a trail he suspected he could have followed at midnight on a new moon. The queer prints from the bottoms of his queer otherworld shoes were stamped plainly into the dirt, along with scuff marks from places he’d slid, stones and pebbles disturbed from their resting spots, and the brush set all astray from his blundering passage. Here and there he’d even left scraps of his shirt.

Of the woman there was no sign, but Cuthbert hadn’t expected to find much. She was cleverer than Eddie by far, and slyer and sneakier too. Nor would she leave much in the way of footprints.   


As he looked, he made sure to keep the position of the door fixed in his mind, and looked back there often to assure himself that all was well with Roland’s body. Should he look back and see the woman creeping up, he might or might not be able to get back there in time to prevent her from doing whatever mischief she wanted to… but he rather thought he would. His vantage point offered a good view of the approach, and he could surely sprint faster than she could crawl.

He stumbled over Eddie quite literally. The toe of his boot struck something soft and he went lurching forwards. He went willingly down onto his knees to better get a look. His first frightened thought was that he’d found Eddie’s corpse, but the way it groaned and feebly thrashed about disabused him quickly of that notion.

It was Eddie’s leg that he’d tripped over. The woman had brought him down and dragged him into a narrow sort of cleft in the rocks. Cuthbert dragged him out, not taking any pains to be over careful with it. When Eddie’s face came into view, his stomach sank.

She’d gagged him with a wide strip of cloth, and tied his hands in front of him with another. Neither was knotted particularly hard or well, but the narrowness of the place into which she’d dragged him meant he wouldn’t have been able to turn over or sit up. He would have lain helplessly up here, unable to move, until someone had come across him, and might very well have choked on the cloth she’d wadded carelessly into his mouth.

As soon as Cuthbert pulled him free, Eddie sat up. He began pawing frantically at his own face, trying to loose the gag, and when Cuthbert reached for his wrists to stop him from hurting himself he struggled, briefly, eyes wide and white all around, staring and panicky.

“Hush and still,” Cuthbert said, “and I’ll get you free quicker than you can do your own self.” Once Eddie had gone obediently still, he pulled the gag free, then made short work of the bindings around his wrists.

“Oh, thank god,” Eddie said, fast and breathless. “Thank god, I thought I was gonna choke in there. Jesus.”

“I ought to have left you,” Cuthbert said sharply. “Roland told you, I told you, and I brought Alain in to back up what we both told you so you knew it for fact, and at some difficulty for the both of us. I told you I wouldn’t come help if you got into mischief, either, but I’ve ever been soft-hearted -”

His lecture was cut abruptly off when Eddie, no doubt still riding the high of being rescued from the cramped and dark confinement, threw his arms around him and squeezed him in a mighty embrace.

“I know,” he panted into Cuthbert’s ear, “I know, I’m a fuckin’ moron, I’m sorry, god, I thought I was gonna die, the bitch choked me out and stuffed me in there and I thought you were just gonna let me rot...” There was an uncomfortably teary edge to his voice, far too close to the surface. Cuthbert rather suspected that he’d spent most of the time he’d been tied up in the dark fighting off hysteria, and now he was too relieved to hold it back any longer.

Cuthbert patted Eddie’s back and then extricated himself from the embrace. He stood and held out a hand to pull Eddie up to his feet. Then he took Eddie by the shoulders and looked him in the eye, face set and serious. “Hear me, Eddie Dean of New York. Hear me very well. This is twice now you’ve had a sharp lesson at this woman’s hands, and twice one of us has been on hand to save you from your folly. Of folly I know much, more than you could ever dream, and it is from the depth of that knowledge that I tell you  _ this must be the last. _ Do you understand? Your third lesson is like to be your death. Do you hear me?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. His eyes jittered in his skull, tracking restlessly all over Cuthbert’s face and beyond his shoulders. A deathly pallor still clung to him, and his dark hair was damp with sweat. He reeked of terror. “Yeah, I hear you. I - oh shit.”

Cuthbert turned to look, stomach sinking even farther. He knew, before he saw, what he would see. And sure enough, there were now two dark forms down on the beach, one the unoccupied and defenseless body of his dinh and one they both knew very well.

 

He turned back to Eddie and drew him in closer. “If she kills him,” he said very softly, “I will kill you both.” Then he pushed Eddie away, whirled around, and sprinted down to the beach as fast as his long legs could carry him, though he knew in his heart it was already too late.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ETA: this fic has not updated in a while, but it isn't dead! I am still actively working on it. Life has happened, as it tends to do, and I've decided I want to get to a specific part before I start posting more chapters, just to maintain my buffer. As of this note (8-15-19) there are about 50k more words of fic ready to go, and I am trying to regularly add onto it. We are inching ever closer to the point where I will start posting again, but I wanted to leave a note for anyone who might catch up with this series during the lull.

The pretty-boy  _ was _ clever. Detta had to give him that. She’d felt a moment of pure frustrated rage when she’d shimmied her way down out of the foothills and across the beach to where the Really Bad Man’s untended body lay, and then saw that his guns were gone. But she was clever too, and she knew a bad man like that didn’t go around with just the one kind of weapon. If the pretty-boy had taken everything, why, she could do for the Really Bad Man with a rock or even with her own two hands. There’d be more than a little satisfaction in squeezing that Really Bad Man’s sickly throat until he stopped breathing, feeling the last wild galloping beat of his heart as it struggled… and then stopped.

But as it turned out, she didn’t need to do all that. The pretty-boy hadn’t been clever enough. When he came running down from the foothills, practically flying, she was sitting pretty beside the Really Bad Man with that man’s own knife held against his throat.

The pretty-boy came up short when he saw that. Detta grinned and waved at him with her free hand, twiddling her fingers.

“Hey there! Nice day, isn’t it? You had a nice little walk out there?” The pretty-boy’s hands dropped down to the guns at his hips. Grinning wider, Detta lowered her hand and dragged a single finger in a double line across her own throat. “I wouldn’t do that if I was you, boy. No, I would not. I wanna see those hands up above your head, boy.”

Obligingly, the pretty-boy raised his hands. “If you kill him,” he called out, voice surprisingly even for how mad she knew he had to be, “you’ll never get back to your own world. Do you know that?”

“Oh, sure, I believe that.” For all the scorn in her voice, though, she felt a niggling doubt. There was some kind of something going on here, some kind of very fucked up something. Odetta Holmes, of whom Detta Walker was almost entirely unaware, may have considered herself too educated to believe in things like magic, but Detta knew better. Detta knew there were things in the world that no one understood, ways of sensing and being and doing that all the science in the world couldn’t explain. She knew that not knowing how something worked didn’t mean it didn’t work.

Hadn’t something, some internal knowledge, told her not to kill the baby-ass white boy? Didn’t something now tell her that as much as she hated and feared the Really Bad Man, as bad as he was, she was in some way connected to him? That her fate was now a part of his? Wasn’t that why she’d sat down here and waited for his boyfriend to come running rather than just slitting his throat and getting on with her life?

“You must.” The pretty-boy’s eye was fixed on her, dark and hateful as the eye of a rat. There was murder in that eye, murder all over his narrow fine-featured face. “Odetta knows, so you must know. She knew about Alain, and the only time we spoke of him was when you were in control, so you must know what she does.”

“Don’t you say that fuckin’ name to me,” Detta snarled. “You keep that name out your mouth. I don’t want to hear about that bitch. You just keep your mind fixed on Detta, how ‘bout that? ‘Cause that’s who you’re dealing with.”

“Either way, you know what I say is true. The door needs all three of you to exist, and you can only go through if he brings you. So it’s not much of a bluff, is it, for you to put a knife to his neck, when killing him simply means you’ve done away with the last thing keeping me from killing you?”

And there it was. Detta’s grin stole once more over her face, her composure returning. No more talk of that other name which she so hated to hear, no more words which almost but didn’t quite make sense to her, which made her think of -  _ the blanks  _ \- nothing she wanted to think about. Just dickering, pure and simple.

“Maybe I won’t kill him,” she allowed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’ll just cut his face up a little. How’d you like him then? Maybe I cut his eye out and you two can match.” She dragged the point of the blade slowly up along the Really Bad Man’s whiskery jaw, up his cheek, to rest at the corner of his eye. “Or maybe I cut a couple more of his fingers off. Maybe I even up his hands for him.” Her grin widened. “Maybe I cut off that little wormy thing you like to suck on so much! Yeah, that sounds pretty good to me. What d’you think?”

“I think you must want something other than to pass the time mutilating an unconscious man. Why,” the pretty-boy said, tone all light and joking while his eye and face promised her a slow death, “he can’t even scream for you.”

“I wanna talk with your ugly boyfriend here,” Detta said, putting the knife back in its place over his throat. “You look like a lyin’-ass son of a bitch to me, but I think you might be right about how I need him to get back to where I wanna go. I got a feeling, and I trust that more than I trust you. But three of you against one poor crippled li’l lady? Now that just ain’t  _ fair _ .” She bared her teeth at him in a grotesque parody of a smile. “So what I want is for me and him to be able to have a nice civilized talk with no interruptions.”

“Is that all? You wish to palaver? You can have it.”

Detta laughed. “Oh, no, I wasn’t born yesterday. I’m not leavin’ you both out to sneak around and try to get up to something.” The baby-ass white boy had crept up behind the other one. He still looked mighty skittish, like she might fly across the beach and knock him down and finish what she’d started up there in the foothills at any second. Detta waved a little toodle-oo wave at him too. “So here’s the deal. White boy there’s gonna lay down, and you’re gonna truss him up like a hog for slaughter. Then you’re gonna put your weapons down and give ‘em to me. I want your guns  _ and _ this ugly fella’s here.”

Plain as the nose on his face, pretty-boy didn’t like it. Even plainer, he didn’t have a choice. Detta watched him work that out, and was it sweet to see? Sure was. She felt about as good as she ever had, getting over on them like this. Stealing was a rush, and the other games she’d liked to play with men - the roadhouse games, the drive-in games - were, but compared to this, that was nothing. 

Finally, the pretty-boy turned to Eddie and said, “You heard her.”

Eddie took a step back. “No way, man,” he said, holding up his hands, wrists still red and chafed from where she herself had tied him not half an hour ago. “You’re not really gonna do what she says, are you?” If he decided to run, the pretty-boy would have to chase after him, and Detta thought that his temper would probably be up after all of that. She hoped he did run. 

From that angle she couldn’t see the pretty-boy’s face, but she could hear his voice just fine. It was flat and expressionless, just barely managing to not be mad. “Of course I’m going to do what she says. She has a knife to my dinh’s throat. A moment ago she was threatening to cut his eyes out. I’d drop my pants and piss in your face if she told me to, Eddie, say true. Now get down on the ground and let me tie you, and don’t make it any more difficult than it has to be.”

Detta cackled. Without the Really Bad Man to keep them in line, these two had fallen to squabbling quick as a couple of puffed-up tomcats. “Better do it,” she called out sweetly. “He don’t sound too pleased with you right now!”

The pretty-boy darted a glance at her over his shoulder like he wanted to say something smart. Detta had an idea that boy’s mouth didn’t know how to be anything  _ but _ smart. His good sense asserted itself, at least for the time being.

Slowly, Eddie got down on the ground. The pretty-boy knelt down next to him, shrugged his pack off his shoulder, and went digging. Just as Detta had suspected, he had a good length of rope in there, and he used it to truss Eddie with the efficiency of long practice.

“That looks good,” she told him. It truly did. If Eddie lay where he was, he would be fine. If he tried to struggle or wiggle out of the rope, the knots would tighten up and draw his feet and hands together until he was bent all up and unable to move. “Now give me the guns.”

The pretty-boy reached for his own gunbelts, then hesitated. Detta didn’t hold it against him. Not much, anyway. A guy like him was a survivor, first and foremost. She recognized the hardness in him, the streak of bloody-minded instinct that had kept him around in the company of a hardcase like the Really Bad Man, and she admired it. To give up his weapons without even a hesitation, without wondering if somehow he could still get the drop on her, well, it just wouldn’t be in his nature.

“You don’t wanna be takin’ too long,” Detta said cheerfully. “You do that, I might start gettin’ bored over here, might start cuttin’ on this man just for some fun. I think first I’ll make him all the way left-handed, then see where I wanna go from there.”

“Alright,” the pretty-boy said mildly. He unbuckled his own guns and came towards her, both belts dangling from one hand, the other held up in the air. “I’m going to set them by you. They’re older than god and twice as valuable, so I don’t wish to throw them about.”

If he made a move, she reckoned it would be then. She kept a wary eye on him, ready to cut the Really Bad Man’s throat and consequences be damned if he so much as twitched suggestively, but all he did was stop a couple feet away and gently toss the guns over. They dropped down beside her, throwing up little puffs of dust, with a satisfyingly heavy pair of thumps. 

“Now the other ones. I know you got ‘em, so hand ‘em over.” She raised the knife an inch and waggled it, then pressed it back down on the Really Bad Man’s neck. “And if you got anything like this knife in there, which I bet you do, I want it.”

He drew the Really Bad Man’s guns from his pack almost reverently, and these he did not throw but slid across the beach to her. After a moment, he reached back into the pack and came out with a knife, the hilt wrapped in strips of old worn leather, more battered and serviceable than the wickedly gleaming thing she held in her own hand but no less deadly, and tossed that. Detta tensed and drew a thin red line across the Really Bad Man’s throat without meaning to, but the knife landed point-down in the beach six inches to the side of her.

“That’s all I have.” He held his hands out to his sides, as if to display their emptiness. Without the guns strapped across his hips, he looked strangely naked, and somehow skinnier. The guns had lent him a certain weight, a certain dignity of bearing. Without them he just looked rickety, almost old.

Detta almost believed him. But when she looked at his sly jackal face, she saw something lurking behind the darkness of his one eye, behind the careful blankness of his face. Laughter, yes, and maybe scorn. He’d seen her jerk when he threw the knife, when she’d realized that maybe he could peg her and knock her away enough her last dying spasms didn’t open his boyfriend’s throat, and he was laughing at her on the inside. Remembering that a couple nights ago he’d pinned her down and squeezed on her and humped his tiny little hard-on against her until she’d fought him off, maybe. Thinking of what he’d do to her when he got his hands on her, maybe, if she was dumb enough to believe he didn’t have something else hidden on him.

She made a sharp gesture with her free hand. “Dump your pack out. I wanna see everything you got.”

His eyebrows rose, but he didn’t say anything. Slowly, he unbuttoned and unbuckled every flap and strap on the thing, then turned it upside down a couple of inches above the beach and shook it.

A whole flood of junk came cascading out. There were a couple of empty waterskins, the wrapped up remnants of some meat, a handful of over-ripe and rather squashed looking berries. There  _ was _ another knife, this one a skinny little knife she thought might be for skinning. There were needles, and thread, and a couple patches of leather. There were plenty of old rags. A couple of closed tins, more rope, what looked for all the world like a long leather billfold, a wrapped bundle of feathers. A clanking bag which she thought might be full of bullets, maybe.

There were no other weapons, though. Only once the pack was empty did she relax. “Alrighty,” she said, “now I want you to drag the li’l white boy here down to the edge of the water.”

At that, there was a crack in the pretty-boy’s composure. “Do you mean him to drown?” he asked, almost mildly. “You need him as well as Roland for yon magic door to stay, you know.”

“Ain’t gonna drown nobody,” she snapped. “You just do what I say.” She’d watched through the door, though not too much - she’d needed to be on her lookout, after all. But she’d seen enough. The Really Bad Man was there in someone else’s mind, riding them the same way he’d rode her, and every so often he’d glance real quick back over his shoulder out the door to see what was going on. She wanted him to look and see his little buddy trussed up down by the water where, come nightfall, those things would get him. She wanted him to hurry back.

“Man,” Eddie said, his voice thin with fear, “you’re not gonna do that, right? You’re not gonna leave me down there for those things, right?”

The pretty-boy stood and went over to him, then crouched down on his hunkers, hands dangling between his knees. “I do believe I am,” he said softly. “Worry not. We have a good few hours of daylight left, and I’m sure Roland will be back before the sun goes down.”

And then he picked the little baby-ass white boy, who couldn’t exactly keep the fear out of his eyes or face, up in his arms and carried him. Carried him like a newlywed bride down to the edge of the water and laid him there, on his side facing them, below the line of kelp and seaweed that marked the high-tide line but a good few feet above the water, so he wouldn’t get wet.

“That’s so sweet,” Detta crooned, and laughed. “Now, pretty-boy, I want  _ you _ to come up here and sit a ways away from me. Come up here and let’s watch and see how quick your boyfriend comes back.”

Without a word, the pretty-boy did so.

\---

Waiting had never been one of Cuthbert’s talents. He hated stillness, hated silence, hated not being able to do what he wanted or needed to do. Over the long decades of his life he’d learned a modicum of patience, but it did not come easily or naturally to him.

So he sat down on the sand, stripped of his weapons, and naturally enough for a man in his situation, he fidgeted. He picked at the ground, collecting small pebbles and stacking them before him. After a time he had found every suitable rock within arm’s reach, so he folded his hands in his lap and looked through the door.

He did not look at the woman. He did not look at Eddie. He most assuredly did not touch the lump of his slingshot, still tucked into one of his pockets. He barely even let himself think about it. If he did, she might see it on his face, and if she took that last weapon from him, then there would be no chance at all.

As it was, he’d need to wait until she was well distracted, and he’d only have one shot. One shot might not mean much, but then, he was a gunslinger, and he’d come out on top with worse odds.

For now, though, all he could do was wait and watch.

Through the door, he watched as Roland, in the body of his third, held up a druggist. His own thoughts echoed Roland’s, though he didn’t know that. The place looked like no doctor’s practice nor witch’s house he’d ever been in. It was so large and brightly lit, so clean it almost hurt to look at, and everywhere Roland’s eyes went there were bright colors and bold type screaming out to be picked up and read. Even experienced secondhand, it was overwhelming.

He watched with a sort of savage triumph. Roland had gotten the drug that he needed to be well again, and a precious lot of it as well. It appeared he’d attracted the attention of the local posse, but they were slow and lumbering men, hardly fit to hold the guns they wore.

As he watched, he looked sidelong at the woman. She was watching as well, just as raptly. But her hand still held the knife to Roland’s throat, and that grip did not waver in the slightest. Absorbed in the events happening beyond the door she might have been, but she was too sly to let all of her attention be so taken.

Idly, Cuthbert began sorting through his collection of stones again. Most were smaller than he would have liked, but there were a couple that were of a likely size. One in particular, a greyish stone shot through with streaks of milky quartz, was suitably large and nearly round. This one he rolled about with one fingertip, then - after sneaking a glance toward Detta - palmed it. One shot.

“What are you going to do if he doesn’t come through in time?” Cuthbert asked, trying for a conversational tone. He wanted badly to look over and assure himself that Eddie was still alright, but he couldn’t let her see how worried he was. She thought the two of them at odds, and that was to the better. Part of him  _ was _ angry at Eddie, but he recognized that she would have made some mischief regardless.

Detta glanced at him, measuring him with her eyes, then looked back at the door. “He’ll come. He better come.”

“But if he doesn’t,” Cuthbert insisted. “Surely you have some plan for that. Are you going to have me drag him back up here and try to hold a knife to both their throats?”

“He’ll come,” Detta said again, stubbornly. “Hush up, now.”

He hushed up. He thought Roland would come through in time too. It was only just coming late afternoon, and the sun wouldn’t be down for some hours yet.

He turned his attention back to the door just in time to hear the unmistakable sound of a gunshot and see Roland fall. The whole world twisted and spun crazily, and then came up still but at an angle. For a terrible moment he thought the man whose body Roland rode had died, and waited to see if Roland would be flung forth from him back into his own body, or if he would die with the man he inhabited.

But Roland’s eyes remained open. Through them Cuthbert watched the gunslinger who’d taken that incredible shot approach. Through them Cuthbert saw Roland lash out at the man, a young man who clearly still had much to learn. Through them Cuthbert saw Roland rise, still living, to his feet, and begin to run.

Detta was leaning forward, wholly engrossed in the drama unfolding before them. She’d been just as worried that Roland was dead, though not for anything so noble as caring about him. Now she watched with her teeth bared, an expression of vicious delight on her face. 

One shot. He was not going to get a better one. He snuck his hand down into his pocket and pulled forth the sling, palmed the rock into the cup of it and pulled it back soundlessly - and paused, taking precious seconds he dared not waste, dared not  _ not _ take. In the years since Jericho Hill he’d worked tirelessly to regain his aim after losing his eye. He was a gunslinger of Gilead and a better shot half-blinded than most men with two eyes were. It had been a long and frustrating trial, though, and he was still not so good a shot as either of his companions, when before he’d been second only to Roland, neck and neck with Jamie DeCurry.

It was an easy shot. If he missed, might be he’d simply wing the woman - and jog her into cutting Roland’s throat. Or  _ anger _ her into cutting Roland’s throat. Might be, though, he’d put his stone through Roland’s neck himself, or shatter Roland’s jaw with it, or -

_ Stop thinking, maggot, _ he snapped at himself in Cort’s voice,  _ and shoot. He who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father! _

He shot. The twang of the sling releasing caught Detta’s attention. She turned back, her face terrible in its sudden understanding, in its fury.

His aim was true. The rock smashed into the hilt of the knife and spun it out of her hand, and then he was up and on his feet before she could grab for it again. He bore her to the ground in a tackle and wrapped his arms around her, rolled them both over, and held her. 

She struggled, of course, struggled ferociously. She screamed and clawed at him, spat and bit at him, but he had her well in hand and she couldn’t do more than hurt him. A little pain was plenty easy to bear in assuring Roland’s life. And soon Roland would come through, and when Roland came through he could come haul Eddie up in plenty of time, and all would be well and all manner of things would be well.

He heard Roland’s mental scream - it was not directed at him, but the two of them had shared khef for decades upon decades, practically since they were still toddlers. Though it was the woman Cuthbert held that Roland called for, Cuthbert heard him, and knew what Roland wanted him to do.

He rose up to his knees, hefting the screaming, struggling body of Detta Walker, and pointed her face into the door as Roland finally turned and looked through it.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, the reunion we have all been waiting for!
> 
> It's been a while since I posted. Many things have happened! Life got in the way, but I have continued to work on this, and there is quite a lot more already written. I wanted to get up to the point of drawing Jake before I started posting more, and I've finally gotten there.
> 
> I hope you will all enjoy this next phase of our rewrite adventure with me!

Her first thought was,  _ It’s the little house on the prairie! _ She’d loved those books growing up, loved to imagine herself as a tough and competent pioneer girl eking out a living in the great American wilds. 

The stretch of land between the forest which lay like a shadowy emerald smudge in the distance and the beach they’d so recently left behind them was not exactly a prairie, and the dwelling was not exactly a house. Nonetheless, when they came up over the hill and into sight of the place, when she saw the standing walls and the tendril of smoke curling into the air, that was the first thing Susannah thought of.

“Is that it?” she asked Cuthbert, upon whose shoulders she rode. They’d pushed Roland in the chair for as long as they could, but finally the terrain had grown too rough, the grass too long and the soil too bumpy. Now Cuthbert and Eddie traded her and Roland back and forth, and when they were both worn out she crawled. She could get along very well swinging herself on her hands.

“That’s it,” Cuthbert said, a fierce sort of joy in his voice. Though he was soaked with sweat and panting, and five minutes ago she’d been about to tell him to put her down a while, he put on a burst of speed.

A figure came out of the door of the little building - she supposed it was a cottage if one wanted to be diplomatic, a hut if one didn’t - and headed down the hill towards them. It moved with a stiff, lurching stride, aided by a stout walking stick, but made faster time than they were.

Cuthbert drew in a deep breath. “ _ Hile!” _ he bellowed at the top of his considerable voice, and snatched a hand off one of Susannah’s thighs to wave frantically at the other man. “ _ Hile and well met!” _

An answering cry drifted towards them. Soon enough the man had drawn up even with them. 

“Holy shit,” Eddie panted from behind them. “It’s Santa Claus. It’s cowboy fuckin’ Santa Claus!”

“The real Saint Nicholas,” Susannah - who had, in another world, been an educated woman and a member of the Movement - said primly, “was a Turkish man -”

“Okay,” Eddie said, “but tell me that guy doesn’t look like he’s about to crack open a cold Coke with a polar bear.”

Truth be told, the man did bear more than a passing resemblance to Santa Claus. He was about Eddie’s height, but very broad and stocky, with wide shoulders and a round belly. His face, what they could see of it between the mop of his curly hair - blond streaked liberally with silver - and his beard - almost entirely silver - was round as well, and certainly looked jolly enough right then.

“Excuse me, my lady,” Cuthbert said, and gently deposited her on the ground. Then he flung himself headlong towards the newcomer.

The man, who could only be the Alain of whom Cuthbert had told them, caught him and enfolded him in his massive arms. Though Cuthbert was nearly half a foot taller, his feet actually left the ground.

Presently, Alain put Cuthbert back down. Then he looked at the two of them and delivered a stiff version of the bow which she had seen Cuthbert do, holding onto his stick for balance as he bent over his outstretched leg.

“Eddie,” he said. “Susannah. Long days and pleasant nights. I am Alain Johns, son of Christopher, and I’m glad to finally meet you in the flesh.”

A short silence followed this greeting. Susannah supposed that Eddie, like herself, hadn’t really  _ believed _ that this man had any sort of supernatural ability, no matter how many times Cuthbert said otherwise. But how else could he have known their names - and not just their names, but her name which she had only so recently chosen?

For she had once been two women, just a few short days ago. When Roland and Cuthbert had together forced her to look into the mirror of the doorway, Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes had both finally seen each other, and had finally been joined into one woman. That woman had taken the name Susannah, which had been a part of both the women she’d once been. How could he have known that, when the only two men who knew - Roland did not quite count, because Roland was barely conscious - had been with her the whole time?

“Okay,” Eddie said finally, “do you have us on the Naughty or Nice list?”

“I don’t have you on any sort of list,” Alain said mildly. “I’m Bert’s invisible friend, sai Eddie, that’s how I know.” Though his tone stayed mild, his blue eyes twinkled in a way she could only call mischievous. “But we can speak of such things later. Here, let me have him.” He held out his arms and took Roland’s semi-conscious body from Eddie with great and terrible delicacy, which was somewhat spoiled by the fact that he then promptly slung Roland over one broad shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

Roland groaned feebly, but offered no protest at this treatment. His two longtime companions exchanged a grim look, and without further ado, Alain went stumping off back up to the house atop the hill. Despite his obvious handicap - his right leg seemed not to bend at all, nor to easily bear his weight - he still made better time than they did, with no sign of being unduly burdened by Roland’s added weight.

“I changed my mind,” Eddie said reflectively as they continued their weary way up to the house. “Dude is obviously Paul Bunyan. I hope you guys don’t have that ox anywhere around here, because I’d wrestle it down bare-handed for some ribs right now.”

When they got closer, Susannah realized that what she had taken for a wooden hut was nothing of the sort. It was more a tent than anything, made of tough hides tied to stakes to form a long, triangular structure.

Cuthbert swung her down from his shoulders once more and set her on the dirt floor, then spread his arms with a flourish. “Welcome to our glorious home! The second coming of great golden Gilead, one might call it!”

“One might,” Alain’s mild voice came drifting back from the rear of the place, “but one oughtn’t.”

There were little square windows in the hide walls that let in shafts of light, and holes along the top to let out smoke from the firepit which smoldered in the middle of the floor. Still, it was comparatively quite dim inside. When Susannah’s vision adjusted, she saw that the rear of the structure abutted a natural cave in the hillside.

A curtain of braided leather strips strung with all manner of shells and stones hung there. Susannah crawled through it. It rattled softly as she did, calling up a memory so bright and real that for a moment she almost forgot where she was: Olivia, her friend Olivia from college who held women’s lib type meetings in her little rowhouse where every doorway had a beaded curtain hung in it, and as the sun went down it slanted in through the windows and lit up the wafting clouds of mixed dope and cigarette smoke and struck a hundred dancing colors from the beads. For a moment she could almost smell it.

The floor of the cave had been covered over with furs, and was almost luxuriously soft under her hands, especially after the last few days of crawling through rocky shore-scrub when neither of the men could carry her any longer. 

Cuthbert squeezed past her to stand in the center of the first room. “Welcome to the sitting room, my lady. We’ve only rough accommodations, I fear, and no tea at all, but make yourself as far at home as you wish.”

“Looks like you boys have done pretty well for yourselves here.” She spoke with sincere admiration. The furniture was homely, true, but the place had a well-lived-in look. The table and chairs were sturdy and scarred, carved down simply from whole huge chunks of wood. The furs lining the floor made it softer than any carpet Susannah had ever felt, and gave the place a pleasantly dusty, leathery sort of smell.

“Coo-ee,” Eddie said, coming in behind her, “you guys are a regular couple of Robinson Crusoe types, aren’t you? This shit is rustic chic as hell. It’s like a fuckin’ hobbit hole.

Back in New York, what felt like a hundred years ago, Susannah - who as Odetta had tried to live a life conscientious of the immense privilege which her - had known people who would have gladly dropped thousands of dollars to fit out a tidy little hunting lodge up-state in this style. There was no pretension here, though. They’d hauled and carved the wood themselves, killed and skinned the animals and cured the hides themselves, and made themselves a home out here in wilderness which would have eaten her and Eddie alive in a matter of weeks, if not days.

“It keeps the cold out and the warm in, at any rate,” Cuthbert said. “And now I must cry pardon for my insufficiencies as a host, but I’m going to take take a moment and help Al get Roland 

He disappeared past another curtain at the back of the room. To the room they slept in, Susannah supposed.

That left her and Eddie quite alone in the cozy little sitting room. Ridiculous as it was, she felt the same sense of awkward dislocation she’d felt when, in the course of visiting a childhood playmate, she’d ended up left alone with someone’s parents or, worse, their younger sibling.

“I feel like we’re the odd guys out at a sleepover,” Eddie said in a low voice. They both began laughing, and it was easier after that.

\---

Over the past couple of weeks, Cuthbert had come to quite like Eddie and Susannah. They would make fine traveling companions, of that he was sure. Nevertheless, it was a relief beyond words to step away from the two of them and into the muffled, dim quiet of the bedroom he shared with Alain.

He went right to Alain where he stood beside the bed and wrapped his arms around him, pressing his body up against Alain’s back and his face into the crook of Alain’s neck. For the span of half a dozen breaths he didn’t speak, simply closed his eyes and breathed in the familiar scent of Alain’s hair and skin and felt the steady rhythm of his pulse under his lips, and let the calm that always brought fill him.

“I missed you as well,” Alain said quietly, reaching up to cup the side of Cuthbert’s head. 

“I missed you  _ fierce _ ,” Cuthbert mumbled into his neck. How much so he hadn’t entirely realized until he’d seen their home come into view, seen Alain’s figure striding down towards them, and been seized with the mad urge to dump Susannah onto the ground and run to him without a backwards glance. 

“I didn’t realize what a trial I’d sent you into.”

“Oh, you’ve no idea. We’ll tell you, all three of us, and you’ll still have no idea. When Ro wakes up,  _ he’ll  _ tell you, and you’ll have no idea.” At the mention of Roland, Cuthbert lifted his face from Alain’s neck and peered over his shoulder at the supine form of their dinh, so small and gaunt in their bed. 

Alain had stripped him out of his filthy clothes and changed the bandages on his hand, and now he lay in the same shallow fever-sleep he’d been mired in since he’d come back through the third door, a blanket draped over his waist. Beneath hs bruised eyelids his eyes rolled ceaselessly back and forth. From time to time he twitched or muttered, but rarely were his words comprehensible.  Sweat stood out on the skin of his face and chest. He stank of sickness.

“I’ll go fetch a bucket or two of water and we can wipe him down,” Cuthbert said, wrinkling his nose slightly. Tidy by nature though he was, he’d gotten accustomed to the unwashed stink of his own and his companions’ bodies on the trek up the beach. Now that he was back in their home, which they kept as clean as a cave two men lived in for ten years could be, he was keenly aware of his dirtiness. And, more to the point, of Roland’s, who was laying in his bed.

So he said, but he didn’t move to let go of Alain. He was loathe to do so, even for a moment.

With a low chuckle, Alain reached up and took his wrists, gently pulling his arms away. “I shan’t go anywhere, Bert. Go fetch some water, and show our guests the facilities while you’re at it. Oh, and give Susannah one of my shirts, would you, so I can take a stab at fixing her dress?” His dubious tone suggested he didn’t think there was much to be done for the thing aside from perhaps setting it aflame, a sentiment with which Cuthbert rather agreed. “Eddie looks slim enough to fit into some of your cast-offs, as well.”

“A kiss, first,” Cuthbert demanded. “For the journey is like to be long, and the burden terrible to bear. I shall need the memory of something sweet to carry me through.”

“Oh, hush.” But Alain did turn and take his face in both hands and kiss him. It was a chaste enough kiss to begin with, just a dry press of Alain’s warm mouth to his, but one of his broad hands snuck its way around Cuthbert’s hip to give him a most impertinent squeeze, and what else could he do but respond in kind?

A peal of laughter from the front room brought them back to themselves. they broke apart with a couple of lingering, regretful kisses. Both were breathing heavily, and a pretty red flush had spread across Alain’s fair face. Cuthbert made to lean in for another go-round, but Alain planted a hand in the middle of his chest and pushed him gently away.

“Go on, now, that was your kiss.” Smiling, he added sweetly, “And mayhap take a bath yourself. You stink, dearheart.”

Eddie and Susannah were seated ‘round the table, admiring the fine scenes Cuthbert had carved into its surface over a decade of idle moments. At present Susannah was tracing a charmingly bawdy little ditty written in the high speech with one finger, sounding out the letters she knew.

“There he is, Suze,” Eddie said, “the man himself.”

Susannah looked up at him, then put one hand over her face. “Eddie Dean, don’t you dare -”

“Suzie here was wondering what your little poem here meant. Now, going by the number of dicks carved on this table and the stuff we  _ can _ read, I’ve got some guesses, but -”

“Why,” Cuthbert said, affecting a look and tone of wide-eyed, faintly scandalized innocence and clutching the bundle of clothing he’d brought out for them to his chest tightly, “has someone been carving rude figures into my furniture? Al must have been more bored than I thought.”

“Come off it, man, you signed half of ‘em,” Eddie said.

Cuthbert had to laugh. “I did at that, didn’t I? Al’s never been much of an artist, anyway. ‘Tis a verse of a charming barroom song, Susannah, though I couldn’t possibly sing it to you. Why, I’d simply die of embarrassment to say such things to a lady… without a drink or two in me. But come now, let’s leave such bawdy considerations behind and look instead to body considerations.”

“Meaning?” Susannah asked, peering at him sidelong as if she were afraid of the answer. Bashful demeanor or no, a deeply amused grin peeked out from under her hand.

“I’m to show you the bathhouse,” Cuthbert said grandly, “and the privy.”

They were duly impressed with both. After weeks of shitting in a hole on the beach, Cuthbert had to admit to a certain fondness for the privy himself. No doubt Susannah would be pleased with the bench, there to spare Alain the hassle of trying to squat with a leg that wouldn’t bend.

The bathhouse, Cuthbert still believed to be a stroke of genius. “‘Twas my idea,” he told the both of them, “for Alain would be happy to go on scrubbing himself in the stream if I let him.” 

In years past they’d improved somewhat on the initial design; there were now two channels dug, one from upriver to the top of the bathing pit and one from the bottom of the pit to a point several feet downriver. Each was lined with stones. The top and bottom of the bath itself were both plugged off with a sturdy plank of wood, and the channel which fed into the bath from the river plugged off similarly, reinforced by a few carefully chosen, heavy stones.

“One gets tired of hauling water, you see,” Cuthbert explained, “and so you simply let the water run down the channel and fill the bath for you, then dam it back up once you’re done. And then you let the dirty water drain away when you’ve finished your ablutions. Of course, one must still haul buckets if one wants a hot bath, but such is the price of luxury in these times.” 

Simple as it was to explain, the whole thing had been months in the making, between digging the channels and finding the suitable rocks to line them, as well as making sure they weren’t about to contaminate their own drinking water with waste.

Eddie, in a fit of gallantry, offered to let Susannah have first crack at the bath. Grinning, Cuthbert elbowed him gently in the side and said, “Perhaps we two can share it next and save on water, eh?”

“Nah, man,” Eddie said, “I left that whole shower sharing business behind in P.E. Eddie Dean is a strictly solo bathing kind of man. Need my private time, you dig?”

Still grinning, Cuthbert made a brief but evocatively obscene hand gesture, and laughed when Eddie’s face went red. “Oh, I understand all right. I’ll leave you two to have run of the property, now, and go rinse Roland off before he sweats  _ all _ over my bed. Try not to get into any mischief.”

He handed over the clothes he’d gathered - Alain’s shirt as a makeshift dress for Susannah, and his own clothing for Eddie- and went back to Alain with two bucketsful of clean river water, leaving them there together. Together they rinsed the sweat and dirt efficiently from Roland’s body and then wiped him dry. Though Cuthbert had grown used to Roland’s wasted appearance, he saw the way Alain’s eyes lingered on the shelf of Roland’s ribs and the jut of his hipbones, and was struck once more by the appalling reduction in the man before him.

And yet even being so gaunt, his body burned with a furious vitality. Certain as he was in his secret heart that their quest would end in death, Cuthbert could not bring himself to believe Roland would ever die. Not Roland, hard as steel and grimmer than old Doctor Death with a hangover. Everyone else they’d ever known, the strangers so recently drawn from some strange other world, Alain and Cuthbert themselves - he could believe in those deaths, but not Roland’s.

“Eddie says he’s getting better,” Cuthbert offered. “Susannah says the same. They say the medicine he brought from their world is very powerful, and he’ll live if he takes it long enough, and if we can keep water and nutrition in him while he takes it.”

“Yes,” Alain said calmly, pulling the blanket up to Roland’s bony shoulders and then putting the back of his hand against his fever-flushed cheek. “That’s all we can do. He’s beyond any help I could give now anyway.”

They sat together on the edge of the bed, leaning companionably against each other. Alain wrapped an arm around Cuthbert’s narrow waist, and Cuthbert leaned his cheek against the top of his head with a small sigh.

Eventually, Cuthbert spoke into the silence. “I need three things, Alain.”

“Oh?”

“I need -” he held up his hand, ticking them off one by one as he spoke - “a long night’s sleep in this bed. Sun-down to sun-up. Wrap me in a clout, for I don’t even want to wake up long enough to piss in the night.”

“Alright,” Alain said, amused. “That’s one.”

A second raised finger joined the first.“I need a bath. A hot one. A good, long, hot bath, and perhaps a lovely man to scrub my back for me.”

“If I see any lovely men around,” Alain told him solemnly, “I will tell them of your need.”

“What a dependable fellow you are.” Cuthbert pressed a kiss against the curly crown of his head. “The last thing I need, Al, is a good fucking. I don’t think I’ve ever needed a lay so badly in my life.”

“You poor thing,” Alain crooned teasingly up at him. “You’ve been, what, without for near on a whole month?”

“Longer,” Cuthbert said primly. “For you hurt yourself before I left, remember? I can’t fuck you if you’ve put your hip out, Al, I’m not so beastly a fellow as all that. Two months at  _ least _ .”

“Why, I’m surprised you can even see straight.” Alain turned his head and mouthed at Cuthbert’s neck, drawing a shiver out of him. “I can deliver you a bath and a meal, dear, but I’m not so sure about the fuck, not with these two about and Roland in our bed.”

“Oh, we can find some pretext to send them away on, I’m sure. I’ll have you on the floor if I need to.”

Alain snorted. “If you say so. The bath first, though, for you’re ripe indeed. I’ll even haul the water for you so it’s hot.”

“A dependable fellow indeed!”

\--- 

Susannah had opted for the bath  _ au naturel _ , more because she hated the idea of any of the men hauling water for her while she sat around than out of any desire to immerse herself in cold groundwater crawling with who knew what microbes. The day itself was fine and warm, with a green and growing spring-like smell to the air, and only a hint of a cool breeze. The water, on the other hand, she found soon was much colder than it looked. Run-off from snow melting up in the mountains, probably.

“You can stay around and chat,” she told Eddie from behind the crude walls of the make-shift washroom. “Just so long as you don’t peek,” she added severely. There were gaps where the hide was strapped to the poles, not to mention the open front and back, a perfect setup for an aspiring voyeur.

“No peekin’,” Eddie assured her. “Scout’s honor. I got my back turned and everything.”

“I don’t think you were ever a Boy Scout,” Susannah said, amused, as she worked her dress up over her head. “But I’ll trust you.”

She looked at the water, clear and still in the bath-pit, and decided to just rip the band-aid off. Taking a breath, she slipped right in with a little splash.

In spite of her determination to deal with it, a startled little shriek slipped out of her when she submersed herself. Lord, but it was cold!

A rustle came from the left side of the shelter, where Eddie was supposedly sitting with his back primly turned. “Shit, Suze, you okay? You sit on a baby lobster or something?”

“I’m fine!” Though now she couldn’t stop imagining one of those horrid lobster monsters scuttling around the bottom of the pool where all of her most delicate parts were just hanging right out there for it to get at. “It’s just cold as hell, that’s all.”

“Yeah, see, there’s another strike against communal bathtime with Sir Bluebeard: shrinkage.”

Susannah snorted. “I don’t know if he’s really a Bluebeard type. I don’t know where you’d keep a room full of murdered wives out here, anyway.”

“Back of the cave,” Eddie responded promptly. “Where they put Roland. Hell, maybe old long, tall, and ugly is one of the wives.”

“Look further back,” Susannah intoned in her most sepulchral voice, “in the  _ very  _ back.” They both busted up laughing at that.

Susannah set to getting herself as clean as she could. They had an actual sponge, as well as a handful of somewhat stiff-looking rags that she eyed dubiously. And, miracle of miracles, there was a rough cake of soap which, when she lifted it to her face, smelled fragrantly of pine needles.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” she muttered, and went to work.

“So,” Eddie said after a moment of silence, which seemed to be about all the silence he could bear. “What’s up next, do you think?”

Truth be told, she hadn’t thought that far. In some ways, the woman sitting in a pool of mountain run-off scrubbing herself with a sea sponge was only distantly related to the woman who had been drawn jointly through a magic door on the beach; a cousin with an uncanny resemblance, perhaps, or a twin separated at birth. No doubt Odetta had had her own ideas about where to go and what to do; for sure Detta had. For Susannah, the most pressing matter had been reaching the safety and shelter of the friend Cuthbert had promised them was nearby, and keeping Roland alive until then.

Now, with a moment to breathe, she realized she wasn’t at all sure what the future might hold. Perhaps she ought to have been worried about that. Maybe later she would be. Right then, she felt curiously content. 

“Well,” she said slowly, thoughtfully, “I suppose now we wait a while and see what the other three want to do.”

“I think it’s gonna get real old, waiting for those guys to tell us what to do,” Eddie groused.

“I suppose so.” Susannah had never been, in any incarnation, a woman who took kindly to being told what to do. She didn’t like it any better now, but she was practical enough to know that she needed the strange men into whose company she’d been thrown - Roland most of all. She’d hardly exchanged three words with him, but he held a powerful fascination for her.

“Could be worse, I guess,” Eddie said. “This ain’t the Ritz - ain’t even a Motel 6 - but it’s better than nothing.”

It was at that. Susannah paused in her ablutions to really look at the landscape spread out below her. It wasn’t beautiful, exactly; no one would be coming along to take pictures and sell a calendar of this little stretch of scrub prairie between the beach and the forest. But it had its own sort of natural splendor all the same. The long yellow grass nodded and rippled in the fiftful salty breeze, and here and there flowers poked their colorful heads up, like some huge invisible hand had splattered the place with drips of paint. It was wild and open and empty, save for the five of them, and it would still look the same decades after they were all dead.

She twisted around and looked up the slope of the hill, to the place where Cuthbert and Alain had made their home. She could only see a sliver of it, one wall and the rocky swell of the hillside which their cave went back beneath. It seemed all at once a very small bulwark against the wilderness of this place. There was a romance to it, though, as a symbol of human perseverance.

“I think it’ll do just fine.”

“Yeah, probably gonna be the best we get for a while. No one’s exactly painted me a very, like, rosy picture of this world.” A pause, and then Eddie went on, sounding strangely self-conscious, “Probably a cave is better than some of the places I’ve lived, but I guess you’re probably used to better. You were pretty loaded, right?”

“Well,” Susannah started, and then stopped. She’d been brought up not to brag about money, which to her parents mostly meant talking about it at all - they had both hated the idea of being the sort of desperately unconfident  _ nouveau riche  _ folks that just couldn’t stop talking about how wealthy they were - but it occurred to her what a pointless exercise that sort of false modesty was here, where she owned nothing more than the clothes on her back. Dirty, torn-up clothes, at that. “Yes, I suppose I was. I don’t think that matters much anymore, though.”

“No,” Eddie agreed, “I guess not. Shame we can’t just pop out through another door and have you whip out the ol’ checkbook and buy us some ATVs and tents and sleeping bags, huh?”

Smiling, Susannah agreed that was indeed a shame. Then she added, “I don’t know if I entirely know what that man is seeking, but it sounds like a pilgrimage to me. I think that traditionally, one does those on foot as much as possible. More in keeping with the spirit, I suppose.”

“Yeah, the spirit of some big-ass bunions.” Another of those brief pauses, and then, very casually, he asked her, “So, do you have, like, a guy?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know. Were you -” she couldn’t see him, but she could imagine the way he waggled his brows just from his voice - “ _ stepping out _ with anyone? Got a husband who’s about to be under some heavy static about you disappearing or a boyfriend who’s wishing he’d put a ring on it sooner?”

“Eddie Dean,” she asked incredulously, “are you asking if I’m single?”

“Hey, hey, now -” just as clearly as she’d been able to picture his saucily waggling eyebrows, now she could picture him raising his hands defensively - “not in like, a weird way. I’m just makin’ smalltalk.”

But she wasn’t blind, nor was she a clueless virgin who didn’t understand how men worked. She saw the way Eddie looked at her, and more importantly, the way he  _ didn’t _ look at her when he knew she was looking. She saw the way he jumped to do her a favor or spend time with her.

And while she wouldn’t say she was ready to hop into bed with him just yet, well - she had said he could sit and talk to her while she bathed, her modesty protected only by a thin leather hide and his honor, hadn’t she? He wasn’t bad to look at, not at all, and more than that, he’d been kind to her and he made her laugh. 

And even more than that, perhaps most importantly of all - because she never would have looked twice at an Eddie Dean in her normal life, would she have? - he reminded her of the home she was increasingly sure she’d never see again.

“Oh, of course. No, I didn’t have any sort of steady fellow.” There had been that one man, that one night out there in Oxford, but that wasn’t anyone’s business but her own. Maybe if he’d come home and she’d stayed on Earth, that might have become something, but then maybe not. “What about you?”

“Nope!” said Eddie, with forced nonchalance. “No steady girls for me. No one I’d, like, bring home to mom, you know?”

“Mmhm.” Having diligently scrubbed herself down, Susannah now found herself sitting in a soup of scummy, grey water. She wriggled forward over the smooth rocks and lifted the wooden block holding the water in place, then clambered out onto the shelf beside the pool as it went gurgling out.

“Those channels are a nice touch,” she said admiringly, if a bit unevenly. She’d gotten used to being in the water, but now that she was out of it, she was cold again.

“ _ I _ wonder why they didn’t just make some wooden pipes or whatever,” Eddie said. “Seems like it’d be easier. You finally done in there, m’lady?”

“Sure am.” Susannah lifted the shirt she’d been given to replace her admittedly filthy dress, then went ahead and slipped it over her head, wet though she was. It promptly slipped off one shoulder, for she was nowhere near as broad as Alain. No great matter; she’d take too large over too small. It’d cover her up well enough. “Would you mind taking me over to the stream, though? I want to wash this dress.” 

Eddie did so, then went to go fill up his own icy bath. Susannah sat on a warm rock in the sun, dunking and scrubbing out first her dress, then her bra and panties - the latter of which did not even bear describing after more than a week of constant wear.

That, she thought, was quickly going to become a problem. She’d found a couple of extra pairs tucked into her purse - courtesy of Detta’s last ‘shopping’ trip, she suspected, because they were both cheap and gaudy, nothing at all like what she would have bought for herself - which she would keep in reserve. Still, four pairs of underwear would not do well at all for weeks or months of hard traveling.

Her mind wandered, naturally enough, onto the topic of the quest - their quest now, she supposed. It would be a time before Roland was well, but after that they’d set out. In search of what, she wasn’t entirely sure. It’d been explained to Odetta, but not well, and her memories of that time weren’t sharp at all. Nor did she even know where they were headed, except for east - or maybe north again, now that they’d gotten to the end of that forsaken beach. Nor did she have any idea how long it would be, except that she had a suspicion Roland and his friends had been at it for a lot longer than a few weeks.

She sighed, and glanced around. As rustic as the surroundings were, she really did agree that it was likely the best they were going to see for a long time. There probably weren’t Holiday Inns in this strange world.

Her wandering gaze happened to swing downstream, towards the crude little bathhouse. A flash of something pale caught her attention. It was Eddie - Eddie with no shirt on, bending over to get his pants off, his white skin very pale in the shadow of the little two-walled structure. Heat rushed to her face, and she looked back down at her lap, heart pounding.

_ Well _ , she told herself, studiously avoiding even turning her head in that direction and hoping against hope he hadn’t seen her looking,  _ he didn’t say no peeking, now did he? _

\---

Once he’d finished with his washing up and laundry, Eddie gamely carried her back up to the little cave-house so she didn’t have to get dirty all over again crawling. Though Susannah appreciated the gesture, she hoped there would be better terrain in her future. Being passed around between the men like a hot potato for the whole journey didn’t sound like a bit of fun at all.

Cuthbert was in the out-building, squatting on his hunkers next to the firepit. When they’d come in it had been banked and merely smoldering, but now it was stoked to a cheerful blaze, heating up a hefty pot of water. He rose smoothly to his feet when he saw them come in, and took the bundle of wet laundry from Eddie.

“I’ll go hang that for you. Watch my pot for me, if’ee would, and make sure it doesn’t boil over.” 

A moment after he left, Alain emerged from the cave itself. He looked at the both of them and gave them a smile, then turned his attention to the pot, which did indeed seem on the verge of boiling. After a second of silent contemplation, he hefted it up and left with it, without a word.

“What d’you think he can bench?” Eddie asked conversationally as he set her down on the carefully brushed dirt floor. “I figure he’s got piggyback duty until we get to some nice two-lane blacktop, what do you say?”

“I figure I’d rather not be carried the whole way,” Susannah said. “But if I am,” she added sweetly, batting her eyes up at Eddie, “why, I’d at least like to help you put some muscle on those skinny li’l arms of yours.”

Presently, Alain came back, once more carrying a full pot. It was large - Susannah would have called it a dutch oven, though the one her mother had owned and passed on to her was made of cast iron, not battered steel - and brimming over, but he carried it with one hand. He set it over the fire, looked at them, looked at the pot, and then disappeared once more into the depths of the cave.

A silent moment passed. Then Eddie said, low enough that hopefully the man in the other room couldn’t hear, “Friendly guy, huh?”

“Hush,” Susannah said. But she was starting to feel distinctly  _ avoided _ , and it was a big change after the last couple of weeks spent with jovial, talkative Cuthbert. Perhaps he chattered enough for both of his friends - she hadn’t had much chance for real conversation with Roland, and he was hardly at his best, but he seemed a taciturn man as well.

It did add to her sense of alienation. More and more, Eddie felt like the only familiar touchstone she had in this world, and she supposed he felt the same about her. Probably that was why he was so sweet on her, more out of a need for something that felt like home than anything else. Probably it was why she found herself so increasingly fond of him. Already there had been a definite shift in the way the group felt, though she couldn’t have put it into words. There had been a closing of ranks, a sense of something fractured being put back whole again when Cuthbert and Roland had rejoined their friend, and now she and Eddie were on the outside of that group.

_ Probably _ , she told herself,  _ you’re just overthinking it. _ There’d be time and more time for them to all get to know each other.

\---

Dinner that night was a couple of rabbits that Cuthbert had bagged, stewed in a pot with fresh greens. Nothing special, but by then all of them were desperate for hot, fresh food. To Susannah it tasted like just about the finest meal she’d ever eaten.

“I tell you what,” Cuthbert spoke up cheerfully from his place on the floor, “I think I find this finer than all the state banquets I attended in Gilead put together.” He and Eddie sat on the pelt-covered floor, while Susannah and Alain had use of the two rough chairs. He had chosen a spot at Alain’s knee, and now gently elbowed him in the leg. “What say you, Al?”

“It’s fine,” Alain said softly, twitching one shoulder in a sort of half shrug. 

“I’m right there with you, man,” said Eddie. He slurped a spoonful - a metal spoon, for those had been gifted to the guests, while Alain and Cuthbert made use of cruder wooden ones they’d no doubt carved themselves - and smacked his lips appreciatively. “I never thought I’d get tired of lobster dinner every night, but boy, was I wrong.”

More than anything, Susannah thought it was probably the greens. Cuthbert had brought along fruit in his pack, but he’d nearly exhausted it by the time Roland drew her. Weeks of eating the same bland diet of fresh lobster monster or dry, smoked smoked without any sort of greens whatsoever had left all of them with nameless, powerful cravings. The sensation was a foreign one for Susannah - though not for Eddie or Cuthbert. Amazing, really, how much she’d taken for granted that her diet would contain everything it needed to without any special effort on her part.

In her mind, she kept a list of things that were different in this world, things she hadn’t ever even thought about having to think about. Clean clothes were one, a clean body another. The effort just to have a bath was astounding to her, a woman who’d lived most of her life with taps that dispensed hot and cold water at the touch of a hand. Now, as she greedily drank down the thin but deliciously flavorful broth, she added  _ a nutritionally balanced diet _ to that list.

“Oh, we were well sick of it long before now, truth be told,” said Cuthbert. “They’re closer and easier to catch than anything in the forest, and most plentiful in winter when fresh meat is scarce, but anything will lose its savor after ten years.” His eye flicked upwards towards Alain, and he smiled a wry, secretive sort of smile. “Most anything, that is.”

From there he took up a cheerful prattling, first telling Alain of their journey down the beach, or at least the parts of it he’d been present for. Eddie and Susannah filled in their own as well - he turned out to have a keen sense of timing, and knew when it was best to turn a story over to another teller. He was also - and it was no surprise to Susannah - highly distractible, and tended to draw himself off onto winding tangents. Mostly he seemed able to find his way back to the topic at hand again, though a handful of times someone had to nudge him back to the point.

Every so often he would direct a question or comment to Alain, who responded in short sentences and only rarely looked up from his food. 

Once dinner was done, he gathered up their dishes and took them outside to wash. Cuthbert glanced after him, frowning a bit, but then turned to Eddie and Susannah and launched into another story. He was standing atop Alain’s empty seat, one foot on the table, loudly and grandly narrating how he’d fought twelve men in a barroom fight, when Alain came back in.

“Alain!” he exclaimed. “Come, help me tell them of that time we fought those louts out Vi Castis way, in that lovely little copper town!”

Alain glanced between him and Susannah and Eddie, then, mouth quirking up in a slight smile, said, “I think you have it well in hand. I’ll take my leave -” this with a short incline of his head towards Eddie and Susannah each - “and watch over Roland.” And with that he disappeared into the back room.

At this Cuthbert frowned even more, but he smoothly took back up the thread of his story, and indeed carried it well enough on his own.

\---

Their time there took on a pleasant rhythm while they waited for Roland to recover. It couldn’t be called idleness, for there was always work to be done, and Cuthbert and Alain put the newcomers to it without compunction. Every day water needed to be hauled, food needed to be cooked, the shelter needed to be seen to, greens needed to be gathered, the firepit needed to be cleaned out, and more.

They had laid themselves in well and built up a handy nest-egg of supplies, but so soon after winter, fresh and kept food was all but exhausted. And so Eddie and Susannah were sent to gather, first one at a time in Cuthbert’s company so he could show them what to look for - and what not to touch - and then with each other or singly. Hunting remained Cuthbert’s domain, though he did take the time to work with both of them at the sling. The maintenance of the home fell mostly to Alain, and Susannah often found herself joining him, for any trip of a significant length required someone to carry her.

She’d always considered herself a tidy person, but over the following days she came to realize that while she might be clean and tidy in her own self, her apartment had mostly been kept by the houseworkers. Suddenly she was thrust back in time, before running water or electric washers or even so much as a spray-bottle of Spic-n-Span. She gained a deep appreciation for the work her foremothers had put in.

Alain turned out to be a dab hand at sewing, as well. She never would have suspected it, but his broad and callused hands were also deft and graceful, and he made neat, tiny stitches that held beautifully. Susannah had learned how to sew from her mother and grandmother as a girl, but they’d started  _ getting ahead _ when she was very young, and it had been a point of pride for her parents that they’d been able to dress themselves and their little girl in new clothes and not have to scrimp and save and sew up sackloth and hand-me-downs.

Where Cuthbert and Eddie both seemed to need to fill a silence, Alain was content to simply sit without speaking. When he did speak, he did so shortly and to the point. Susannah wouldn’t have expected it of such a big man, but he was very quiet and soft-spoken.

One could have bent steel around the force of Roland’s will, even when he was sick and on the edge of delirium. Cuthbert’s personality was warm and expansive, and he sought to fill any available space. Alain, by contrast, seemed almost to take up less space than he actually did. It wasn’t a smallness, exactly, but a sense of self-containment.

As the days passed she grew to suspect that he was shy. The more he spoke to her, as well, the more she realized that his speech had a familiarly unformed, almost mushy quality about it, as if his teeth and lips and tongue could not quite form the crisp edges of the words he said. It was a manner of speech she knew from her grandmother, who’d died in her eighties after a series of increasingly large strokes. 

After that realization, she watched him closely, looking for other signs, but she didn’t find anything conclusive. His gait was stiff and awkward, but it was clear that was from an old injury. His hands were deft and deliberate in their movements. Perhaps the right corner of his mouth drooped a bit, and perhaps so did the lid of his right eye, but then again, perhaps that was simply how his face looked. Certainly he didn’t show any dramatic signs of it, no paralysis or mental confusion or difficulty finding words. Even the mushiness of his speech was slight enough she stopped noticing it after a couple of hours speaking to him.

She had grown quite used to occupying the little cave home in companionable silence with him, and was therefore quite surprised when one afternoon he spoke, not raising his eyes from the pair of pants he was hemming for Eddie.

“I suspect you have a bit of the touch, Susannah.”

“Excuse me?” She did look up from the pair of buckskin shorts she was trying to sew for herself, to go under her increasingly tattered dress. Once it’d dried that second day, Alain had indeed taken it down and fixed what he could for her, but it hadn’t been made to stand up to the rigors of outdoor travel, and she wasn’t keen to flash her drawers every time she moved.

“It’s very faint,” he went on, “so I wasn’t sure. I’ve been trying to touch you myself to see if you responded, but it doesn’t seem to be the ordinary sort.”

There hadn’t been much more talk of the thing Cuthbert and Alain called  _ the touch _ . Still, Susannah remembered the first day, when this man she’d never seen before bowed to her and called her by a name she’d only taken on days before, and a little chill went up her back. “You mean psychic powers, right? Being able to read other people’s minds and things like that?”

He nodded. “That is one form of the touch. It often comes with being able to send thoughts as well as read them. Being able to feel the feelings of others, even the hidden ones, that is another. Receiving portents and seeing signs, that is another. Knowing the future with any surety is a rarer one. Some know the past instead.” He glanced up at her, just a quick flick of his blue-eyed gaze, his hands never stilling in their work. “Have you ever felt any such?”

“Well… no,” she said, “I don’t think so. I’m sure if I had psychic powers, I would have noticed by now.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. It can be subtle. I’m given to understand that such things are considered to be fanciful tales in your world. That could make it hard to know.”

“That sort of stuff doesn’t exist where I come from,” Susannah said. “There have been a lot of people who  _ claim _ to be psychic, but no one’s ever been  _ proven  _ to be. It’s always a scam.” She laughed a little, almost uncomfortably. “I don’t mean to, you know, be rude, but I’m still not sure I believe in that kind of thing.”

Smiling slightly, he shrugged again. “That’s fine.” 

Except, she realized, his mouth hadn’t moved at all, and the sound of his voice was much clearer, and seemed to be coming from just beside her ear rather than several feet in front of her… Another shiver worked its way up her spine. “What makes you think I’ve got anything like that, anyway?”

For a long time, he said nothing. His hands slowed, and then finally stopped their sewing, and then he folded them in his lap, staring thoughtfully into the air. Finally, he spoke. “I feel it in you. It’s very faint. But your mind is…” He raised his hand and made a gesture she had seen Cuthbert make before, quickly turning the wrist and flicking open the closed fingers as if throwing or brushing something away. It meant  _ many _ , or  _ much _ , or - as Eddie had once put it -  _ lots and lots _ . “Larger. It goes further back. It is as if you are a shallow cave, but with a crack in the very back through which a breath of air comes, or perhaps the distant sound of dark water…” 

He pressed his closed fist to his right temple for a moment, then dropped his hand back to his lap. “It does not seem that you can hear my thoughts unless I send them. If you dreamed of prophecy, I daresay you would know. Perhaps ‘tis only a very faint talent, as many have, or perhaps ‘tis a rarer one. I ask only that you think on any experiences you may have had which seem out of the ordinary, any visions you may have received.”

And with that he picked his sewing back up, and they passed the rest of the day in silence until Eddie and Cuthbert came back.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Susannah and Cuthbert have a disagreement over teaching methods and discuss the merits and drawbacks of non-violent protest.

Susannah hated the carrying harness. It was a contraption that much resembled a baby-carrier, albeit made of strips of hand-tanned leather cunningly tied and woven together, and made to a far larger size than any child. The straps which went across the chest and shoulders of the wearer were adjustable, but the ones that formed the carrying basket of it were one size, since they were made to fit one person: her.

It was useful. There was too much practicality in her not to admit that. Carrying her in it meant her weight was more evenly distributed and allowed whoever was doing the carrying to use their hands, and it vastly reduced the need to worry about dropping her or - as had happened the last time she’d been brought along into the outskirts of the forest - whanging her head on any low branches. 

It also chafed her terribly, physically and spiritually. The world from which she’d been taken had been hostile to the disabled, but even the most crowded, narrow, and pot-holed sidewalk was like a wide avenue of perfectly flat black-top compared to the landscape in which she now found herself. The constant gentle rolling of the ground, which looked deceptively flat viewed from a distance, made the use of the wheelchair impractical on its own. That could have been managed - she had strong arms and wasn’t afraid of hard work - but that was only the first barrier. The soil was thin and rocky, hiding holes and stones, and the grass which looked so smooth and even seen from afar proved to grow in knotty clumps once she was among it. Perhaps, with assistance, she could have forced her chair across that landscape, but it wouldn’t be a matter of  _ if _ she popped a tire or bent a wheel-rim out of true, but  _ when _ .

All the same, she refused to stay cooped up in the house doing housemaid work. Maybe that suited Alain, but she was keenly aware of how easy it would be to fall into a woman-shaped box in this group and end up doing nothing but washing, mending, and cooking the whole long journey. None of them would mean to push her into it, but the weight of their unconscious expectations might put her there anyway if she didn’t work to keep herself out of it.

So she submitted, albeit with poor grace, to the indignity of the carrying harness, because it was better than being stuck inside all the time.

Today Cuthbert was hauling her freight. Even though she was pretty sure that she weighed near as much as he did, missing legs and all, he kept up a decent pace and still had breath left over to chatter. This man, Susannah was beginning to suspect, would chatter with a hole in his lung until his air ran out.

“‘Tis a fine day for slingwork, my lovely lady, and make no mistake,” he said to her. “See you how strong the light is, and how constant? No clouds in the sky to move over the sun and cast a sudden shadow, nor wind to throw your aim off. Today you’re going to bag us dinner.”

“Am I, now?” she asked, amused. He’d put her and Eddie both up to target practice at the home place whenever they had a spare moment, using stones he’d gathered up to knock different stones off of things. The day before yesterday, he’d taken her out and let her practice with the small supply of perfectly turned steel balls he kept to take down prey. The fact that she had to hunt down and return any that went astray was a good motivator to aim carefully. She’d done well at that, but she hadn’t yet tried to shoot at anything that moved.

“You are,” he assured her solemnly. “‘Tis a day and a half back to the home place if one doesn’t sleep, two if one does, so tonight we’ll sleep rough and eat whatever you catch.”

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” she said, trying to hide her dismay behind a jocular tone. “Forgive me for saying so, but you don’t look like you should be missing too many meals.”

Though she couldn’t see his face, she could hear the grin in his voice. “Fear not for me, lean and hungry fellow though I am. I’ve gone longer without, and in worse company.” A brief period of quiet fell, and then he said, more seriously, “Worry not, though. I’ve taken you out because you’ve a better eye than Eddie and lower to the ground besides, so stealthier. I don’t mean to embarrass you with a test you cannot pass.”

That steadied her nerves somewhat, but not entirely. A not wholly unpleasant nervousness began to build in the pit of her belly. It was a feeling very much like the one she’d gotten before an important exam or presentation in college, when she knew she’d practiced and polished and prepared all she could, but still had to anxiously wait and see whether or not this would be the time she’d bomb it.

It was, at least, a beautiful day. All around them the tall grass sang with hidden insects and the twittering of ground-birds, and the sky above was a deep and boundless storybook blue with only the gauziest wisps of cloud. The air smelled hot and heady and a little summer-dusty. It made her think of sitting beneath the apple tree outside her childhood home with a book across her knees while the cicadas sang and the bees hummed drowsily around her mother’s garden and the sunlight poured down out of the sky like honey.

Two hours later, they were in the forest. Susannah had been out there only a couple of times before, owing to the length of the trip and the difficulty in carrying her there and back, and each time she felt every bit as small and awed as the first time.

It was an  _ old _ place. Beneath the trees the shadows were thicker and the air more still. It felt like a cathedral, made not of orderly stone and carved wood and stained glass but of a furious profusion of greenery, of sun-dapple and leaf-litter and ancient roots knit together for miles beneath their feet.

For another half hour, Cuthbert walked, and then he found a place that seemed to his liking. There he finally shrugged out of the carrying harness and let Susannah free, and there they made a rough camp.

She half expected him to put the harness back on, but instead he simply gestured for her to follow him. “You’ve an advantage when it comes to sneaking through the undergrowth,” he told her, “for you’re much lower than most men would expect anyone to be. It’ll be easier for you to see where you’ve left sign of your passage, and easier to pick up sign of others having passed through as well, and few trackers will be looking for the sorts of sign you’ll leave.”

Then followed a long period of time during which he showed her how to find trail. It was a good season for it, for all sorts of animals were out and about, taking advantage of the good weather and plentiful forage to fatten up before autumn and winter came. She learned to spy out a deer-trail, as well as the tell-tale tracks and nibblings that bespoke a place where rabbits fed, or, even better, the soft and lumpy ground where rabbits denned. She learned as well how to spot a likely den, and how to tell if it was empty or occupied, and by what.

“Once his hip is better,” Cuthbert said, “we ought to get Alain out here with you. He’s much better at tracking than I am.”

“What happened to his hip?”

Cuthbert waved a hand. “He fell and put it out of place a little while back. It seems much better now than when I left, but, no offense intended, I wouldn’t want the two of you out here alone in the woods before it’s fully mended. Once a joint slips out of place, ‘tis forever weaker and more prone to doing so again. I’ll have to speak with him and see what he thinks. Really, he makes Roland and I both look like blind men.”

“Does he, now?” Susannah asked. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

“Oh, aye, he’s got all sorts of talents one wouldn’t guess by looking at him.” Cuthbert cast her a wry look. “But as far as tracking goes, yes, he’s the best of us at it. Were Jamie DeCurry still with us, that might not be true, but Jamie’s years gone for the clearing. It’s part the touch, of course. ‘Twould be hard for a man to be  _ bad _ at tracking, were he as strong as Alain in the touch.”

“He said he thinks I might have it,” Susannah blurted out. She hadn’t meant to, really. She’d mostly put that conversation out of her mind - her conscious mind, at least. Evidently her subconscious hadn’t let it go so easily. 

Cuthbert paused and looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Did he, now?” he asked slowly. “When was that?”

“Just a couple of days ago. He said he felt it very faintly, but thought something was there, but he didn’t know what.” Feeling self-conscious, Susannah shrugged. “I’ve never noticed having any psychic powers, but he seemed pretty sure.”

“Yes,” said Cuthbert, rubbing his chin with one hand, “he doesn’t tend to be wrong about such things. If he says you’ve got something of the touch about you, then you must have. Many people have only a touch of it, you know, just enough to have feelings or little knacks for knowing things. But he can’t tell what it might be, is’t so?”

“Yes, that’s what he said.”

“Well -” Cuthbert shrugged and resumed walking - “let me know if you start seeing the future in your dreams, if you would. Al’s portents are always so vague, it’s maddening.”

He guided her, but let her choose the way. At one point, though, they came across a clearing with a curiously marked tree. One branch had a number of white furrows dug into it, startling against the brownness of the bark, and the bark below that seemed rubbed thin. Several others in the area were similarly marked.

Cuthbert tensed, then reached down and took her shoulder, squeezing slightly. “This is a place to leave. Do you know why?”

Susannah looked around at the trees and imagined the size of the animal that must have marked them. “Something nasty around here?”

“Yes,” he breathed. “Bear.”

Alarm pulsed through her. “There are  _ bears _ here?” she hissed.

“Oh, yes. Mostly they don’t bother you, but it’s best to steer clear. I had an encounter with one myself not too long after we settled down here.”

She wanted very badly to be gone from the place. All she could think about was looking over to see the huge, shaggy form of a full-grown grizzly rearing up between two trees on the other side of the little clearing, and knowing in her last moments that there was no way she could get away in time. At the same time, she couldn’t help being curious. “You met a bear?”

“I fought a bear,” he corrected, somewhat smugly. 

“With what? Your slingshot?”

“Oh, no.” He dropped a hand to his hip and touched the butt of one of his guns. “That would have been foolish indeed. No, I climbed a tree and shot him in the head. We wear him for a robe when it gets cold, now.” He turned around, tugged his pants down low on his skinny hips, and lifted his shirt free, to show her his bare back.

There were a number of scars, including one dimpled crater beside his spine that she was almost sure had to be a gunshot exit wound, though how he could have possibly survived that, she couldn’t imagine. The one that really caught her eye, though, and the one she thought he meant to show her, was a series of thick raised lines running diagonally across his lower back, from just under his ribs on the right all the way to the bottom of his hip on the left. Though they were clearly years old, they were still stark and terrible against the golden skin of his back.

He dropped his shirt, hitched his pants back up, and tucked it efficiently back in. “I was lucky,” he said, “and didn’t get my spine ripped out of my back. As it was, I spent quite a while laid out flat in bed with Alain tending me, helpless as a newborn babe, and I still ache something fierce in the morning and when it gets damp.”

They moved quickly on after that. Susannah spied out a well-worn trail that led to a shallow pond, and with Cuthbert’s approval they laid up in the thick undergrowth a few yards away to see what came along. He handed her over his sling and his pouch of steel shot, and settled in beside her.

Hunting turned out to involve a whole lot of doing nothing. A city girl, even if she hadn’t been born as one, Susannah had never  _ been _ hunting, and she’d always had an image in her head of men in camo stalking restlessly through the trees, rifles cocked, waiting to descend upon an unwary deer. Instead she laid on her belly on the ground, shifting occasionally to keep from getting too stiff, and waited.

And even though he was an incorrigible chatterbox most of the time, Cuthbert kept quiet too. In fact, he almost seemed to fade out of her awareness, even though he was right next to her. His breathing slowed, and he went so still that he might have been made of stone or wood, just another piece of the forest floor.

“Aim for the eye or the skull if you can,” he whispered to her, soft as a breeze. “The knee if you can’t. Crippled and unable to run is as good as dead.”

“Alright,” she whispered back. Privately, she thought that shooting little pebbles was one thing, and hitting a deer in the eye from twenty feet away quite another, but she didn’t say that to him. He and Alain - and Roland, when he was lucid, which was increasingly often now - were all perfectly, serenely unable to be budged in their shared conviction that she and Eddie were gunslingers, regardless of what the two of them had to say about it.

Maybe if she flubbed this, it would convince him she wasn’t cut out for it. There was a part of her - the civilized part that had lived in a penthouse suite in New York City, that had gone shopping at Macy’s and watched the eight o’ clock news and filled out the Sunday crossword - that recoiled fiercely at the thought of being a gunslinger, at the thought of ever putting her hands on one of the huge and deadly pistols any of the three of them wore at their hips. That part hoped to show them that they were wrong. She could be useful, sure, and helpful, sure, and would go along on this journey, because it was only fair that she did after Roland had helped her become whole. But she wouldn’t do it as a  _ gunslinger _ . 

There was another part of her, beneath that part, which was very afraid of anything that might make them decide that. That part had, once upon a time, been called Detta Walker. That part knew she had it in her to be deadly and wanted it, and feared failure.

That part would shoot out a deer’s leg and then slit its living throat without hesitation.

Though she considered herself a patient woman, the waiting was almost unbearable. Anticipation sung along her taut nerves, minute after minute, but when an hour and then another slipped by, she began to grow bored. And cold. And stiff, in spite of her constant shifting and flexing. Along with the shivery anticipation of making - or failing to make - a kill, now she began to worry that when the opportunity came, her attention would have wandered and she would miss a perfectly good shot.

Over the past few hours, her ears had grown attuned to the sounds of the forest. Cuthbert heard it first; she felt him stiffen beside her, perking up. Then she heard it as well: the delicate snap of a twig, the rustling of a body brushing through leaves. Something was coming.

Her traitorous mind called up an image of a bear - not any bear but  _ the  _ bear, the Ur-Bear, the bear from whose image all other bears were formed, the perfect enormous killing machine - and then the deer came stepping along the path.

It paused at the edge of the clearing and raised its head, sniffing the air, then swung its neck from side to side. Susannah practically stopped breathing. At her side, Cuthbert once more went as still and quiet as a stone. 

Cautiously, the deer took a step forward, and then another. It came to the edge of the pool and lowered its muzzle to drink.

Slowly, very slowly, Susannah readied the sling and drew the cup back. To her ears the soft creak of the elastic stretching was as loud as a gunshot, but though the deer’s ears flicked, it didn’t leap away. 

_ The eye or the head or the leg.  _

She looked at the deer, its head square between the two branches of the sling. A cold clarity dropped over her, like God himself had reached down and wiped a season’s dust and grime off the windowpane of the world. She saw the deer, saw the angle at which it held its head, saw the ripples from its lapping tongue, saw the muscles in its long neck. She could practically see each individual hair growing out of its face. Its round black eye was as big as an apple.

“Your lesson,” Cuthbert murmured to her, so softly she was barely sure he’d spoken at all. Had his mouth not been right beside her ear, she surely would not have heard it.

For fear of frightening the creature away, she did not say the words. Instead, she mouthed them. 

_ I do not aim with my hand. She who aims with her hand has forgotten the face of her father. I aim with my eye. _

_ I do not shoot with my hand. She who shoots with her hand has forgotten the face of her father. I shoot with my mind. _

_ I do not kill with my gun. She who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her father. I kill with my heart. _

She drew the cup back. The deer raised its head. She let go. The elastic twanged, alerting the deer at last to its peril. It jerked and kicked its legs and turned to run. At first Susannah was bitterly sure that she had missed, that her shot had gone entirely wild.

Then the deer fell, legs a spasmodic tangle. It kicked out and lashed its head wildly from side to side, then was still.

Cuthbert burst up out of the bushes, whooping loudly enough to startle up a squawking, scolding cloud of birds several trees away. He grabbed her beneath the arms and hauled her up out of the underbrush, spun her around, and planted a firm kiss right on her mouth, then set her back down again.

“Well done! Well done and well done and well done, my lady!” He strode over to the corpse of the deer and flipped it over onto its side. “Come see. Come claim your kill, dear.”

Susannah crawled in close and saw that the round black button eye was now a gaping, bloody hole. She’d made the shot after all. Made it well and very well. An expanding bubble of elation rose up through her chest and into her throat, blocking off her breath and words for a moment. She reached out and touched the deer’s head, just beside the eye she’d shot out.

It was still warm. But for the ungainly sprawl of its body and the blood around the hole where its eye had been, it could have been asleep. Suddenly she saw the deer all over again, with the same sort of clarity as she had moments before. This time, though, rather than seeing her target - rather than seeing it with a killer’s eye - she saw it for the living thing it had once been. Seconds before it had been a delicate and unfathomably complex biological machine, a living thing that breathed and felt and yearned to survive, until she’d come along and put a steel ball in its brain.

All at once the joy filling her turned to cold horror. She knew animals died every day to feed people - she wasn’t sheltered enough not to know where her steak came from, after all - but this was the closest she’d ever been. And somehow this felt worse than the impersonal, mechanical action of a slaughterhouse. She had personally snuffed out this bright flame of life. And by God, just seconds ago she’d been  _ glad _ about it, proud that she was able to bring down the deer.

Cuthbert crouched beside her and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing lightly. “At ease,” he said gently. “Is this the first time you’ve killed anything?”

Mutely, Susannah nodded.

He squeezed her shoulder again. “It’s a good thing that you take it hard. One must understand the value of a life to be able to take it with honor. To do otherwise is harrier’s work. Now that I’ve shown you how to kill, I’ll show you how to make use of your kill so that the deer’s spirit may be at peace.”

He went down to his knees, then, in the dirt and leaf-litter, and cupped the deer’s dead face between his hands. Quietly, he murmured something in a language Susannah could almost understand, but didn’t quite.

“I thanked her for the use of her meat and hide,” he told Susannah. “I told her she was beautiful and died well. ‘Tis all any of us can hope for, in the end.”

Cuthbert hauled the deer back, braced across his shoulders. Susannah was glad that her lower vantage point and her need to watch her way through the undergrowth meant she didn’t have to look at it. The way its lifeless head lolled on its limp neck made her feel sick.

What followed when they got back to camp was labor, pure and simple. Cuthbert hung the deer up by its back feet and slit its throat to let out the blood, then its belly to pull out the guts. This Susannah had to watch, though it made her guts clench and her gorge rise. Watching the casual way he reached into the deer’s open belly and pulled out its glistening innards, she didn’t feel accomplished or clever or like she was learning anything. She simply felt barbaric.

Next he showed her how to cut the skin free from the body. And although Susannah knew they’d make good use of every part of the corpse they could, it still felt like profound desecration to take the poor dead thing and rip its skin off so it hung naked and bloody in the woods, with only its killers to witness.

Luckily, as they labored, she found she had less and less energy to spare for feeling sorry. The feeling was still there, but she had to concentrate on what she was doing. Skinning and butchering a carcass was hard work. Once the deer had been reduced to a pile of disparate body parts and those body parts further cut down into steaks and strips and haunches to be cooked or smoked, she found it was easier to view it as a thing of which she was going to make use, rather than a living being whose life she’d ended.

And like it or not, she  _ did _ start to feel accomplished. Never in her whole life had she worked so hard.

Cuthbert roasted them a couple of hearty venison steaks. After they ate, he showed her how to cut the remaining meat into strips, then went to dig a smoking pit. Once they’d hung the first strips of meat up to be smoked and covered the rest to keep the flies off, he led her back to the pond to wash off. The cool water felt heavenly on her stiff and aching fingers, and she was more than happy to scrub off the blood.

“The first time I was ever given a sling,” he told her as he rinsed his hands clean, “I was, oh, six or seven, I reckon. It wasn’t the one I have now, of course, but a smaller one meant for a boy. More a plaything than a weapon, really, though good practice all the same.” He gave her a very sharp sort of smile, one that made his face look foxy and feral. “Boys raised to the gun generally weren’t given toys that weren’t good practice in one way or another, you understand. Most everything was a lesson of some sort. The sling, though… I spent a few days shooting leaves and empty bottles and hats off the heads of dandy gentlemen to get a feel for it, and then one day I was out a-wandering through a courtyard when I spied a nice fat squirrel sitting in a tree. Now, the castle squirrels were famously unafraid of people, and most of them about as big as cats from eating out of the middens, so he made a fine target.”

 He wiped his hands dry on the front of his shirt. “Of course no one was stupid enough to trust me with steel shot, so I had a pocketful of likely pebbles I’d picked up hither and thither. I pulled out a nice big one, loaded it up, and shot the glossy fellow as he sat no more than ten feet away, all sure I wouldn’t ever hurt him.”

“And it died?” Susannah guessed.

His mouth quirked to one side. “No, actually. I knocked him from the tree and no doubt gave him a mortal wound, but he was still alive when he hit the ground. I came up on him, all twitching and kicking with his eyes bulging and blood coming out of his nose and mouth, and fell to my knees right there. I don’t mind telling you, I felt like about the wickedest creature ever put on the planet. I was supposed to have outgrown crying by then, but I surely did shed a tear or two.” A sidelong glance towards her. “Perhaps more. There was a fine squirrel nest in the tree I’d shot him out of it, and all I could think about was if he had a little squirrel wife and little squirrel children who’d be wondering when Da was coming home from gathering acorns. But I was a year into my ‘prenticeship and I knew what I had to do, so I picked the poor thing up - I still remember how soft and warm and heavy he was, and the way his little heart was racing - and twisted his neck around so he wouldn’t suffer any longer.”

“And then what?” Susannah asked, horrified and fascinated all at once. 

The image of it was so clear in her mind that she could almost feel the warm, dying weight of the squirrel in her own hands, could almost see the little boy - skinny and fox-faced with a curtain of glossy black hair and two dark eyes which usually sparkled with mischief but were now wet and brimming over - kneeling in the short and well-tended grass of the courtyard beneath the tall tree where the poor creature had made its home. She could imagine well the castle around him, and feel his terror that someone might come along and see - see what he’d done, see him crying, ask him what mischief he was up to now.

“Well,” Cuthbert said, “then I went and fetched Roland, for he was my first friend, and I told him the whole sordid tale. He told me to stop blubbering and act like a man, for I was practically a gunslinger, and then we went and buried the poor thing together. I think I was a year off or so from making friends with Alain, or no doubt I’d have had him sending the thing’s little squirrel soul on.”

Susannah looked pointedly at the guns strapped to his hips. “Doesn’t seem like you learned any important lessons about going around shooting things, though.”

“Oh, no,” he said seriously, “I learned the most important lesson that a gunslinger can learn that day, Susannah.” He reached out and took hold of her shoulder, and caught her eyes with his own. “I learned that a man must never fire his weapon unless he understands what the consequences of it will be and is prepared to accept them. It’s very easy to take a life, even as a careless callow boy. Consequently, one mustn’t do it without care.”

“I thought this was just a test to see if I was any good with this thing.” She patted the pocket into which she’d shoved the sling. A slow sort of anger had begun to thrum in her chest. It was borne partly of feeling lied to and partly of feeling like a rat let loose in a maze. “But, what, you wanted to see if I could kill good, too?”

“I wanted to see how you took it,” Cuthbert admitted easily. “One cannot be tenderhearted as a gunslinger, though we had ka-mates who were. One cannot be vicious, either, though we certainly had ka-mates who were that. When the time came, you aimed with your eye and killed with your heart, and you understood the gravity of what you had done. You showed fine indeed.”

“Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. And what if I hadn’t, huh? What if I couldn’t do it? What if I liked it too much? Would you stop trying to make me be a gunslinger, then?”

Cuthbert looked steadily at her, and shrugged. “Either way, I would have known more than I did before. A tender heart can be toughened. To gentle a vicious heart is perhaps a harder task, but viciousness can be put to use as well, though it is not honorable to enjoy killing.”

“Really? Because from what I heard, your buddy Roland seems to like killing just fine.” She reached out and gestured at his own guns, though she didn’t try to touch them. That she knew better than to do. “I’m sure you don’t wear those things just because they look nice. You fellas are all about killing, aren’t you?”

“We’re very good at killing,” he said, “yes. We trained at it for years, ever since we were small boys. We were not taught to  _ like _ it, though. It is one thing to take pride in fighting well, another entirely to take joy in taking life. We are gunslingers, not harriers.”

Susannah was reminded of how Detta Walker had seen this man. To her he’d been a jackal, a sly and grinning thing with a secret face beneath. Detta’s view of the world had been badly skewed, but she thought perhaps Detta had seen something very true about Cuthbert Allgood. The friendly man who laughed and joked and smiled so easily was real enough, but so was this solemn-faced killer sitting beside her, telling her earnestly that he’d tested her so he knew better how to use her in the future.

“That’s a bullshit thing to do,” she told him, trying to keep her voice even. “You can’t just go around pulling secret tests on people like that. I’m not a kid or - or a lab rat for you to mess around with, see what I do when you rattle the bars of my cage.”

“The world will test you sore before we’ve reached our goal,” he said to her. “Be angry at me for not dealing straight with you if you wish, I won’t deny you that right. Deny your calling all you wish, for it will find you anyway. Ka is a bastard like that.” A brief, hard smile flitted across his face, there and gone like the shadow of a passing cloud. “But I’ll do all I can to keep you and Eddie alive, and if the lessons are hard, well, ‘tis a hard world we live in.”

\---

“Look,” Susannah said, some hours later, as they sat around the evening fire. Cuthbert had let her brood in uncharacteristic silence for a time, and she’d gotten her thoughts into some kind of order. “I still don’t buy into this gunslinger stuff.” She held up a hand to forestall any protests, though he simply regarded her in attentive silence. “I don’t mean I’m not willing to come along or help how I can or even learn how to shoot. It’d be useful, that’s obvious. But the whole secret society deal? I’m not buying that. And I don’t want any more of this hidden test stuff either. If you want to see how I do at something, you tell me that’s what you want to do, okay?”

Cuthbert laced his fingers together and propped his chin on them, smiling faintly. “Why, if I were to do that, ‘twould defeat the entire point, would it not?”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, come now, you’re a smart woman. See here. If I tell you what I aim to do, then one of two things will happen, and neither of them is what I want.” He held up one long, skinny finger. “Either you’ll try to do what you think I want you to do, regardless of your natural inclination…” He held up another. “Or, since you’ve made your objections to becoming a gunslinger so clear, perhaps you’ll deliberately fail so that I’ll think you ill-suited and drop the matter. Am I correct?”

“Or I’ll have time to actually prepare myself,” Susannah argued, “and do what I’d normally do, but better.”

Before she even finished, Cuthbert started shaking his head. “No. These sorts of lessons - how to shoot, how to kill, how to handle having killed - they aren’t like schoolhouse exams, Susannah. You don’t get to practice your lessons all evening beforehand and then come up and write your answers on the chalkboard. Think you the enemy will wait to ambush you until you feel  _ prepared _ ? Think you that killing time only comes once you’ve hardened yourself to it?” He made a derisive gesture, as if brushing the very idea away. “The purpose of an exercise such as this is to see if you freeze or fumble, if you cry or throw up at the sight of blood or glory in your kill, and to see that before you’re in a situation where you might get yourself or someone else killed. Then we know what work needs to be done.”

“Okay, you need to stop - look, I’m not a child, alright? I’m a grown woman. I have a right to know what’s going on. You guys can’t just keep dragging us around putting us through these bullshit secret examinations and acting like it’ll ruin the whole experiment if you tell us you’re trying to teach us something!” 

He paused thoughtfully. “You are a grown woman, it’s true. Cry your pardon, Susannah, but the three of us were taught as boys, and ‘tis all we know of passing on the craft. The methods by which one teaches a child should hardly be held the same for an adult, ‘tis true enough, for as you say with such passion, an adult has a right to know what is expected.” He ran a hand back through his hair. “But all the same, the skills we seek to teach you must be learned all the way down to your sleeping undermind. They must be there for you to call upon even after your up-top thought has stopped. You must be able to act and react quicker than you’d be able to think about what to do.”

“You’re being weaselly about it,” Susannah said, not without some admiration - she suspected Cuthbert Allgood had forgotten more about weaselling than she’d ever known - “but you’re still talking about being a gunslinger. Neither of us wants that. Aren’t we allowed to say no, here? I mean, you can’t  _ make  _ us.” It felt curiously childish to say that -  _ nyah nyah, you can’t make me -  _ but it was the honest truth… wasn’t it?

Cuthbert shrugged. “We cannot tape a gun into your hand and make you fire it, no. We can’t make you accept your nature, should you choose to deny it. Nonetheless, it  _ is _ your nature, and it will have its way, by one road or another.” He looked at her across the fire, yellow light dancing on his solemn face, one dark eye and one shadowy empty socket. “‘Tis true, do you not agree? One may deny one’s nature, but that doesn’t change it. The two of you have been called to this bloody killer’s art as surely as any of us who were born of a thousand years of it. The choice before you now is not to accept or deny, but to learn and live, or spurn being taught and die.”

“False equivalence,” Susannah said crisply. “I don’t accept the premise. You can teach me to shoot and hunt and do all this other survival stuff without me agreeing to be a gunslinger.”

A brief smile flitted across his face. “Fair enough. Let me rephrase. Since ‘tis in your nature, should you accept being taught, inevitably you will learn the ways of a gunslinger. You may kick your feet and dig in your heels along the way all you like, but one cannot be halfway true to oneself. The only way to avoid it would be to avoid learning entirely, and were you to do that, you would surely die along our way.”

“I don’t accept that premise either.” Susannah lifted her thumb to her mouth and chewed a moment at the nail - a nervous habit she’d tried to leave behind years ago - and then forced her hand down into her lap when she realized what she was doing. “That it’s somehow in my  _ nature _ . I mean, you don’t even know me that well. How can you tell? Is it more -” she made a derisive gesture - “mystical psychic shit?”

He answered her promptly. He always seemed to have an answer ready, did Cuthbert, and it was beginning to wear on her. “Nothing so arcane as that,” he said, amused. “I simply can. Like calls to like, I suppose, and as for how that is, well, you may as well ask how a lodestone calls to a piece of iron, eh? It’s in the way you move, Susannah, the way you breathe, the way you shoot.” Leaning forward, he forked two fingers towards his own face, then hers.  _ Eyes on you _ \- in any other situation, it would have been a comical gesture. “It’s in your eyes.”

Susannah recoiled as if he’d tried to physically strike her. “It is  _ not _ !” 

“Oh,” he said, “but it is. I’m a chary old fellow, I am, and I know my kind.”

“I am not -  _ we _ are nothing like you!” The words burst out of her, hot and faintly panicked, before she could even think of a more diplomatic way to frame them. But there wasn’t really, was there? The bald truth of the matter was that although she had grown quite fond of both of these men - and even Roland, to some degree - she couldn’t ever forget for long what they were. She’d be going along all smoothly and then, like now, stumble over some stone erupting from the soil, all hard and cold and ancient, and be forcibly reminded of it. She didn’t know the word  _ chary _ \- it sounded like the word  _ char _ to her, to partially burn, to blacken, and it felt appropriate, for they surely did rub off like ash on whatever or whoever they touched - but she took his meaning well enough.

He raised his brows. For just a moment a look flickered over his face - not quite hurt, but surprised, perhaps, that she would so vehemently deny it. Then it was gone, and he was simply looking at her with that infuriating little smile on his face. “Are you not?”

“No! I mean -” Susannah took a deep, slow breath, and counted to five. She wasn’t going to let him goad her into getting mad and sloppy. “I’ve told you about the Movement, right? About Doctor King and the Freedom Riders and all the things we’ve done to end segregation and gain equal rights?”

“Aye, so you have.”

“See, here’s the thing. I have trained, along with many people in the Movement, to engage in what is called  _ non-violent resistance. _ That means things like sit-ins, human chains, not giving up your seat on the bus - times where you just sit there and make yourself be like a rock and don’t react no matter what kinds of crazy things the other people try to do. That means you do something like go sit in a whites-only restaurant and they all get in your face, pull your hair, blow smoke at you, call you names, hit you - even turn the dogs or the hoses on you - and you don’t fight back. You just sit there and you don’t react. Do you see what I mean?”

As she spoke, his eyebrows climbed up higher and higher on his face, until they were nearly in his hairline. When she was done, finally, he said in an incredulous tone, “You are telling me - and please correct me if I’m wrong - that what you trained to do was to simply sit in place and let folk abuse you? The folk who made slaves of your ancestors, and who made laws to keep you as second-class citizens? And you thought that would make them treat you more fairly?”

“Well,” she said, stung, “no. Not exactly. Not those folks, no. But they’d see that, they’d see one of us sitting there while those crazy white folks crowded around lookin’ like they were full of demons -”

“And just all decide to free you and speak no more of it? Susannah, that’s madness. Surely it would merely make them think you weak and easier to suppress, even deserving of it for not being willing to defend yourselves.”

“They didn’t  _ think _ we were weak,” she snapped, truly angry now, hot with it and uncaring of how she sounded. “They thought we were  _ animals _ . They treated us like beasts and then turned around and said we were too dumb and destructive to live free. So you have someone do something like that - you get a picture of a man sitting at a counter without so much as a frown on his face while ten white folks spit on him and scream at him - and it shows that we’ve got human  _ dignity _ . It makes them look like the animals, not us. That’s what it’s  _ about _ . And that’s what I trained to do. Non-violent resistance, not going in guns blazing and shooting people up.”

Cuthbert nodded solemnly, a thoughtful look on his face. “I take your meaning, and I will own that you know your own world better than I do. Never have I known a situation where such a thing would achieve any sort of results, but that is here and you were there, so -” He made a throwing-away motion, fluttering his open hand towards the horizon, as if to dismiss the whole line of discussion. “But I do take your meaning - you say that because you have made a study of this form of non-violence, it is therefore not in you to do violence, yes?”

“Well, yes.” Susannah frowned suspiciously at him across the fire. That there was a trap was obvious just from his tone, but she wasn’t sure what it was. “That’s sort of the whole point of that exercise.”

“I believe, then, you have something of a misapprehension about what we are trying to teach you. I shan’t insult your intelligence by saying that the way of the gun  _ isn’t _ violent or bloody or that we aren’t all likely to end up feeding the worms sooner rather than later, but that isn’t  _ all _ it’s about. Violence is…” He paused, putting his chin into his hand as he thought, and then snapped his fingers triumphantly. “Violence is a tool, Susannah. One of the many tools we use, and often the final one, but far from the only one. Being a gunslinger is as much about knowing when to  _ not _ use it as using it. We have many other purposes - you have, for instance, heard Al and I call Roland  _ dinh _ , have you not? Know you what that word means?” 

She shrugged. “I guess from context it means he’s in charge, right?”

He nodded approvingly. “Exactly. It means leader. When we say it of Roland, whose illustrious band had dwindled down to just us two sad fellows before you and Eddie came along, it just means that. When we said it of Roland’s father a thousand years ago, when Gilead still stood and the Affiliation of Baronies meant something outside of children’s stories, it meant  _ king _ . I suppose, too,” he added in a softer, almost wistful voice, gazing for a moment into some distant past which felt, just then, so close it raised the hair on Susannah’s arms, “that it meant so when we said it of Roland after the fall, when we thought perhaps we might still win out.”

Susannah waited a time, to see if he had anything else to say. When it became clear he didn’t, she said, “Alright, so, you say that he was the son of a king, as if being a king means you can’t be a jack-booted tyrant ruling through state-sponsored, violent thugs? It still comes down to the same thing. You’re talking about killing people, and I don’t want any part of it.”

She thought perhaps that might offend him. But he just threw his head back and barked laughter. “Oh, you have such a way with words, you do! You truly do come from a different land. I don’t deny that, no, not at all. But surely even a civilized woman such as you knows there’s more to being a king than just that. I mean to say that Roland was raised to  _ rule _ , and we were raised to support his rule. A gunslinger is a diplomat, Susannah, and a messenger, and a judge and executioner, and a lawman, and a dispenser of justice, and so much more than that, all in one. These -” He patted the butt of one of his guns - “are power. ‘Twas true when Arthur Eld used them to knit a hundred squabbling petty lords into the greatest kingdom this world has ever known, and ‘twas true when all three of us were but mere fresh-faced little laddies, and it’s still true now. Any harrier can strap on a pistol and pull a trigger, but to earn the big irons, one has to show that one knows how to use that power as well. And it is this that we wish to teach you, and it is this that I say is in your nature, not simply cold-hearted killing.”

“And you just don’t care whether or not we want to learn it, huh?” she asked softly.  _ Before you and Eddie came along _ , he’d said, as if they’d just taken a stroll and not been virtually kidnapped into this world!

For a time, he said nothing, and simply looked at her. Then he shrugged. “I suppose we do not, at that. I for one intend to teach you regardless, for I’d rather bear your resentment than your blood on my hands.”

And after that, there was nothing much more to say between the two of them.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starting this chapter off with some good old-fashioned gore! Then we have some SusEddie time, always fun, and Susannah dealing with some womanly problems, because fantasy never addresses this issue and quite frankly Stephen King's take on it was dumb. (Where are they even getting an infinite supply of rags to bury and discard a week out of every month?? Susannah's generation would have gone in for home-made, re-usable cloth pads, Mr. King, come on.)

Susannah came awake all at once, sure that something was wrong. The very first breath she took, she gagged upon a monstrous, whopping stench of corruption. A hand clamped over her mouth. Breath tickled against her ear, warm and close.

“Be silent,” Cuthbert whispered, so quiet she felt the words in the movement of his lips more than heard them. All the hair on her neck and arms stood up. “Don’t move.”

From nearby came a series of snuffling snorts, like the rooting of a pig, and awful, wet tearing sounds. Slowly, fearfully, Susannah opened her eyes. When she saw it, she wished immediately that she had not.

The closest thing that she could say it looked like was a boar. No boar had ever grown so huge, though, nor so twisted. It stood with one flank towards her, head down in the shallow pit they’d buried the entrails of the deer in. That explained the sounds, at least. Nothing could explain the way the thing looked.

It had six legs, each of which ended in a grasping, clawed paw rather than hooves. Its actual color was impossible to determine, for most of it was the ugly livid bruise-color of rotting flesh. Great sores spread across its body, eating in some places down to the very bone - she could see half of its ribs on the side facing her, and near its hindmost leg there was a hole the size of her head through which she could see both the joint of its hip and the fetid chamber of its guts. Maggots squirmed at the edges of the necrotic sores. Thick, curdled fluid ran from them, and she could see more matted in its short and filthy fur and crusted to the bare areas of its flesh. Looking at it gave her a feeling of such visceral and horrified disgust that it lay over her mind like a blanket, smothering any thought but that anything that made her feel that way had no right to exist, none at all.

Beneath that, though, there was a stirring of pity for the agony the thing must be living in. How it was even alive in that state, she couldn’t say, but it surely would not be for much longer.

Without moving anything but her eyes, she looked over at Cuthbert. He was pressed up very close to her, and his face was so drawn and still he might have been carved out of stone. He didn’t look at her, but instead at the monstrous thing. Slowly, his hand crept down to the gun at his hip, though his eye never left the creature.

In unsnapping his holster and drawing his gun, he didn’t make a single sound that Susannah could hear. Had the warm and vital weight of him not been pressed against her, had the wind of his breath not gusted over the side of her head with each exhalation, she might not have even known that he was there, so quiet was he. But somehow, the creature heard.

It swung its head up, and she could not help her sudden gasp. Its mouth was a tangle of viciously curved teeth, some growing around each other, some growing straight up through its snout to curl out over the top of its head. One eye bulged sightlessly from the socket, swollen and bloody and crawling with worms. The other socket was empty. The top of its skull was bare and dented, and in one place a bulge of pulsing grey matter showed through.

The same sort of cold clarity came over her then as she’d felt when she shot the deer. Everything seemed to happen very slowly. The thing took two snorting breaths and began to scuttle towards them, unspeakable fluids dripping from its wounds to patter on the ground as it moved. A rope of intestine hung from its mouth, which it could not close, swaying with its gait.

Cuthbert raised his gun, took aim, and fired. All of this he did with unearthly speed, but Susannah saw each movement clear. Before her ears had even heard the sound of the report, her eyes knew that the shot would go wild. The thing moved too erratically, and he had only the one eye. With any other creature, it would have been a mortal blow, or at least enough to scare it off. His bullet raked the side of its head and blew out a chunk of its skull. This thing, though, had some unholy sort of life, and merely staggered and then came all the faster.

Susannah did not think. Had she taken time to, they would likely both have died. She reached down between them, grabbed Cuthbert’s other gun from its holster, and fired every last bullet into the oncoming thing’s head. Her eye and mind  aimed and fired while the rest of her, the  _ Susannah  _ part of her, stayed flat and blank, cold and motionless as a stone on the ocean floor.

When she was done, there wasn’t much head left. The thing stood still, swaying, and then fell ponderously over onto its side. A loop of entrails flopped out of the hole in its hindquarters, accompanied by a gush of foul brown fluid. A wave of stench washed over them, so powerful she could not help but gag. The gagging fit continued until she knew, suddenly, she was going to vomit. She just barely managed to roll over onto her side and avoid doing it all down her own front, or onto Cuthbert.

When she finished her heaving, she looked back over. Cuthbert, shirt pulled up over his nose, cautiously approached the thing’s body. He got within a few feet and then, overwhelmed by the corpsey reek of it or perhaps just unwilling to get any closer, backed away.

They gathered their belongings - which Susannah was already beginning to think of as their ‘gunna’ - in silence. Neither of them wanted to breathe anymore than necessary. The meat they’d smoked and hung up had been destroyed as well, though mostly uneaten. The thing seemed to have pulled the racks down and rooted through it, covering much of it with unknowable and stinking fluids. Perhaps it had enough of a mind to destroy for the sake of destruction. Perhaps it simply wanted raw meat. The hide was ruined as well, all holed and matted with ooze.

It wasn’t until Cuthbert pointedly - but still silently - took his pistol back from Susannah that she even realized she was still holding onto it. Though she’d never fired a gun before, it sat well in her hand. The hefty, killing weight of it felt right.

He regarded the gun silently for a moment, then holstered it. Susannah expected him, perhaps, to scold her for having grabbed it without asking - they were touchy about their guns, these men - but he didn’t.

She was the one who broke the silence, finally, when they were well on their way out of the forest and away from the campsite. “Sorry I grabbed your gun like that. I hope I didn’t offend you.” She wasn’t really sorry, exactly, because she was pretty sure she’d saved both their lives, but he’d been unusually subdued. Maybe near death experiences just took him that way.

“Sorry?” he repeated, sounding amused, though she couldn’t see his face. “My dear lady, no need to apologize for having kept us both alive. That was quick thinking and good shooting. You’ve a good eye. A pair of them, in fact.” He laughed, but it had a hard undertone. Maybe that was the root of his mood - that his own shot had gone wide. 

Considerately, he said nothing about how the incident only proved his point from the night before. Susannah thought enough about it, though, without being reminded. Maybe he knew that.

She hadn’t fumbled or frozen or choked up. There’d been no time to, but plenty of people would have. She had no illusions that in most situations, with her level of familiarity with firearms, she’d be worse than useless, but it had been almost impossible to miss at that range. And afterwards, she’d felt no sense of guilt. That thing would have killed them both if it could and gone rooting in their guts the way it did the buried entrails, and it had needed to die. It wasn’t just that she thought she’d put an end to its pain - although she had - but that she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if she hadn’t killed it, it would have killed them.

The lack of guilt did make her feel a shadow of guilt, but only a shadow. Worst of all was how right the gun had felt in her hand, how natural an extension of her arm it had become. When the moment came, the gun had not been some crude and deadly tool, but a part of herself. Whatever she might want to think of herself, the fact reminded that she was a person who could feel that way.

“What was that?” she asked Cuthbert when they’d finally made it out of the forest. Just yesterday she’d felt a sense of awe in the place, but today the trees loomed and leered over them, the wind rustling through their leaves sounded like they were whispering ugly secrets to each otherl, and the cool shade felt gloomy. It wasn’t until they were out under the sun that she felt able to speak of the thing. “You warned me about bears, but I would’ve appreciated knowing about the - whatever that was.”

“Honestly?” He cocked his head around to look at her from the corner of his eye. “I have no idea what that was. Some monstrous big mutie pig is the best I can come up with. I’ve never seen such a thing before in all my years - nor smelled, come to speak of it! - and I hope never to again. Fervently do I wish that. I may go on my knees and pray to such effect when we stop for the night, in fact.”

Susannah glanced uneasily about, as if a herd of the things might descend upon them at any moment. It was one more reminder of what an alien world this truly was, and how twisted it had become. She’d had the story from Eddie - with Cuthbert and Alain filling parts in, and even Roland now that he was recovering enough to leave his sickroom - of the world’s history, so she knew of the old war, and she’d been told of the scars it had left on the land. Somehow it had never seemed quite real. Maybe because the place they’d come to rest looked so undisturbed, so peaceful and pastoral, as if it had never known the touch of human hands.

Now that she knew things like that could be lurking anywhere, though… The monsters that came swarming out of the tide in the evening didn’t compare, not one bit.

“You don’t know?”

“Not I, no! I’ve many uses, ‘tis true, but I’m not a walking bestiary. Anyway -” he shrugged, jostling her - “we are far beyond any land I’ve ever been to or heard of, or indeed any land I’ve ever so much as seen a map of. We’ve walked quite off the edge of the world, I do believe, and into some place where men likely haven’t lived for hundreds of years. Like as not there’s worse than that little nasty fellow hiding in the depths of those woods.” 

He said it cheerfully enough. A shiver passed over Susannah. It was hard to imagine anything worse. Still, she believed him. It did not sound at all like a joke.

“And that’s where we’re going, isn’t it?” she asked softly. “When Roland is better?”

“It is indeed. And soon now, I would think.” Unspoken but clear was the fact that she and Eddie would need to be prepared to face such a thing again. Not just prepared in their bodies, either, or in their skills, but in their hearts and minds.

They did not speak much more for the rest of the way home.

\---

The day after, Susannah and Eddie were invited to go out gathering on their own. It was a clear enough attempt to get the two of them out of the way for some private gunslinger discussion, but Susannah didn’t mind. She and Cuthbert had recounted the story of the monster in the forest when they’d gotten back, but she hadn’t been able to say much, and it weighed heavily on her mind. She didn’t want to admit how frightening it had been to any of the gunslingers, and especially not Roland, who intimidated her badly now that he was up and about more often.

Sitting side by side with Eddie out on a low hill overlooking the scrubby little strip of prairie between the beach and forest, though, she felt much freer. To him she told the whole story, of both her argument with Cuthbert the night before and then the sudden, horrible awakening the next morning, the blankness that had overcome her, the way the whole world had slowed down and clarified for her, and the way it had weighed on her afterwards.

He was very easy to talk to, was Eddie Dean.

“That sounds like a real nightmare,” he said. “I probably woulda just wet myself and died.”

“Oh, I don’t know. According to those fellows back there, we’re both gunslinger material. Besides, you’ve actually  _ used  _ a gun before.”

Eddie shrugged. He didn’t like to be reminded of that firefight he’d been through, which was fair enough. The memory was tied inextricably up with the memory of his brother’s death, and that, Susannah knew, was still a raw spot indeed. “Yeah, but Balazar wasn’t as scary as some kind of fucked up undead pig monster. Jesus. I hate how they all act like that shit is just normal, you know?”

“Yes,” Susannah said. She reached out and took his hand, as much to comfort him as herself. She liked to touch him as much as she liked to talk to him, and she knew both were dangerous, but she didn’t much care. Back in her own time and world, she might have, but here all those things seemed much less important. “I suppose it’s just now hitting me how different this world really is. And how dangerous it is. I don’t want to be some kind of killer, no matter what they say, but -”

“You don’t wanna be lunch, either.” Eddie gave her hand a squeeze, then let go and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. It was a very familiar gesture. Susannah leaned against his warm side, breathing in the man-smell of him. They kept clean enough, cleaner than she would have thought, but there was still a good honest tinge of sweat to that smell. “I don’t know, I guess I don’t have the same issue. Don’t know if I’m, like, cut out for it, but I don’t mind learning how to shoot good. Maybe it’s just some kinda power fantasy thing.”

“Maybe,” Susannah said, smiling. “Maybe the lady doth protest too much, though.”

“Oh, no,” Eddie said seriously. He twisted around to look at her straight on. “I’m just not, you know, a good person. Kind of an asshole, in fact. You’ve got all those moral convictions and shit.”

She chuckled, no doubt as he’d hoped she would. An answering smile spread across his face. “You have such a way with words, Mr. Dean.”

“A guy’s gotta have some redeeming qualities, right?”

They were still very close together. In another world, in a time that felt increasingly like a whole bygone era, Susannah might have been coy. She might have flirted and teased and gone slowly, not for lack of desire but because it was how the dance was done, and because she was all too aware of how harshly she’d be judged for indulging herself. There was always the Cause to uphold and think about. She had no regrets about the length of her life she’d devoted to it; at the same time, it was a bit of a relief to lay even a part of it down.

She reached out and touched the side of Eddie’s neck. He froze like a rabbit in headlights, staring at her with wide eyes. Hazel eyes, beautiful eyes, eyes that lit up when he smiled or laughed. 

Susannah curled her hand around the back of his neck and drew him closer, leaning up. She did it slowly, so he’d have time to move away if he wanted to. Not that she thought he wanted to. No, it was pretty clear to her at that point in time that he wanted this as well, and that she’d done a better job of hiding it than he had.

Their lips met, and it was as sweet as she’d hoped. As the kiss deepened, she wrapped both her arms around his shoulders, and slowly his own hands came up to cup her back, resting so lightly on her. She nibbled at his lip and he pulled her closer. 

He was very gentlemanly about it. Though he kissed her back with equal fervor, he didn’t grope or grab at her, or drag her into his lap to grind against her. When she broke away for just a moment to take a tactical glance down between them, she saw the lump of his erection straining against the front of his jeans, but he gallantly did not press it on her.

Right then, she didn’t feel like gallantry. Desire rolled through her like the tide, hot and insistent. She wanted this man and she wanted him right then and there, and she didn’t give a damn for propriety, nor for the fact that they’d be laying together out under the open daytime sky, in front of God and everyone. 

Hands locked around the back of his neck, she let herself fall backwards into the grass. He probably could have resisted it, but he let himself be pulled along with her, catching himself with his hands planted beside her head.

“Uh,” he said, staring down at her. “Um.”

Susannah couldn’t wrap a leg around his hips to pull him in, but she could and did roll her body sinuously beneath him. “Come on down here with me, Mr. Dean,” she said softly, looking into his eyes. “We’ve got some time to kill before they’ll want us back, I reckon, and I can think of a good way to spend it.”

Then, finally, he touched her. He rebalanced himself on his hands and knees over her, straddling her hips, and ran a hand down the line of her body, cupping her breast and then drawing his fingers down her stomach and the swell of her hip. Her dress had ridden up quite a bit already from their moving and fumbling about, and so when he got down to her legs his fingers touched the bare skin of her thigh quite soon. 

“Just wanna check,” he said against her mouth, “that this is really happening? Because, I’m gonna be honest with you here, this is a lot like the dreams I’ve been having for the last week, and if I’m like, laying on the floor of the Guncave pitching a tent and humping the air or whatever, I wanna know sooner rather than later.”

Susannah wrinkled her nose. “No need to be so crude. This is plenty real.” She drew her own nails down the length of his clothed back, delighting in the way it made him shiver. “Anyway,” she added, wickedly, “maybe I’d be watching the show.”

“Why, Susannah, that’s a dirty md you got there!” said Eddie in a low, admiring voice.

Susannah grinned up at him and laid a finger against his mouth. “Yes, but don’t tell anyone. I keep it hidden so as not to alarm anyone. And if Cuthbert ever found out, I’d never hear the end of it, I’m sure.”

Grimacing, Eddie said, “I’d rather not think about that guy right now, thanks.”

“Well, maybe I do.” Before Eddie could say anything further, she pulled his head down and kissed him again. She didn’t, in fact, want to think about anyone else but Eddie right then. Cuthbert was a handsome enough man, and he flirted like he breathed. Some people were just like that, she knew. He flirted as much with Eddie and his friends as he did with her, which showed just how much _ that  _ meant.

She worked open the buttons of his shirt and got her hands in there, stroking his chest and tweaking at his stiff nipples. He wasn’t very hairy at all, something she quite liked in a man, and though he was skinny, the weeks of hard physical exertion had given him quite a bit of muscle definition. In a couple more months, he might be said to be rangy and lean, rather than just skinny. 

He pushed her dress up, sliding his hands beneath it. They were warm and soft against her, tracing the curves of her hips and belly and coming to rest on her breasts. His mouth moved from her mouth to her neck and then lower down to her collarbone, making her squirm. She ran a hand down his chest and belly and cupped the shape of his hard cock through his pants, squeezing just a bit, just gently, gratified at how it made him twitch and gasp.

It had been a long time for her. It had clearly been a long time for him, too, if the way he fumbled to get his pants down and the way his hands shook as he touched her was any indication. Still, he knew what he was doing. His fingers pressed skillfully between her legs, tentatively exploring the shape of her sex and then, with more confidence, stroking up some slick to rub at her where she wanted to be rubbed with. When he slid into her, he did it gently enough, and she was wet and ready and welcoming.

The sky stretched out wide and blue above them, but she had eyes only for Eddie’s face. He flushed prettily, going steadily redder the longer they continued, his hair hanging down in his face. She reached up to brush it back, then let it fall again to grip at his shoulders while he worked above her.

When it came clear he was getting close, she snuck a hand down between the two of them to where they were joined. First she just touched, feeling his hard length as it slid in and out of her, all sticky-wet with her own fluids - and how deliciously dirty it made her feel to feel that! Then she put her finger to herself, stroking and pressing with practiced ease.

He pulled out of her at the last moment and stroked himself off, grunting, onto her belly. She found her climax not long after, clenching down hungrily on the achy emptiness inside. 

“What a gentleman,” she breathed up at him, smiling. “I didn’t even have to ask.” In truth, she hadn’t even thought about it. Once they’d started, she’d been so eager to have him, all thoughts of potential consequences had fled. Now that the haze of lust was clearing from her mind, though, she was more than a little appalled at her own thoughtlessness. Back on Earth, that would have been one thing. To be risking pregnancy here, when the closest thing they had to a doctor were a couple of men who probably knew how to give stitches and hack off a limb - 

“That’s why the ladies love me,” Eddie said, and kissed her. He flopped over onto his side next to her, close enough for her to feel the heat of his body but not quite holding her. Was he, perhaps, feeling shy about that, after the intimacy they had just shared? Susannah couldn’t blame him. She herself wasn’t so sure what this meant for the two of them either.

Whether or not it ever happened again, though, she already felt the dark cloud which had hovered over her ever since that day in the forest drifting away. She wasn’t alone in this world, no matter how lonely it sometimes felt.

“Well,” she said, after they’d spent a time drowsing together, “we should probably actually try to grub up some roots.” She sat up and smoothed her dress down as best as she could. “So no one gets suspicious.”

“Sure,” Eddie said. He had a dreamy, fuck-struck sort of look on his face that made Susannah suspect their companions would have an idea of what had gone on as soon as they saw him. Maybe once the idea would have bothered her, but right then it didn’t.

At least they’d have an excuse for being all sweaty and dirty and ruffled, though. It was dirty work, grubbing in the ground for edible roots. Satisfying, though. Susannah’s parents hadn’t ever encouraged laziness or spoiled behavior in her, because they’d known what it was like to grow up poor of everything but pride, but she’d rarely ever had to do such physical labor in her life. It felt good to know the roots she was digging up now would be dinner tonight.

“You know,” Eddie said after an industrious span of time had passed, “there’s something that’s been bothering me about all of this.”

“Oh, yeah?” Susannah glanced up at him, smiling. A streak of brown dirt was smudged across one of his cheeks, and she felt the most incredible urge to lick her thumb and wipe it away.  _ Calm down _ , she told herself. “What’s that?”

“Well… Roland’s got his two buddies back there, right? And they’re actually for-real gunslingers. Been there, done that, bought the novelty t-shirt, right? They did the whole childhood boot camp deal and really buy into the whole thing, right? So…” He sat up and wiped the back of his hand across his brow, mussing his sweaty hair and leaving another faint streak of dirt across his pale skin. “So what’s he need us for?”

And that, honestly, was a question that had been rattling around Susannah’s subconscious mind as well. Roland had gone to a great deal of trouble to bring the two of them over, and the mere fact that he had done so seemed to be all the explanation the other two needed: Roland had done it and therefore it had needed to be done. Susannah wanted a bit more explanation than that.

“Something to do with that ka he’s always going on about,” she said. “Not a very satisfying explanation, though, is it?”

“Nah,” Eddie agreed easily. “It’s BS. You wanna know what I think?” He leaned in towards her, as if there were anyone out here to be listening in to them. “I think he needs us in case a member of the Disabled Senior Veterans Brigade kicks it, that’s what I think.”

Susannah lifted a hand to her mouth. “Why, that’s a terrible thing to say, Eddie.” It sounded distressingly plausible, though. 

Eddie shrugged. “Yeah. I haven’t known him very long, I admit, but he seems like that kind of guy. Bet if you asked either of the other two, they’d admit it, too.”

\---

Susannah sat on the rude wooden plank which served as the privy seat - and lord, how it brought back memories of her childhood, before they’d started Getting Ahead, and the bathroom had been an outhouse! - and tried to tell herself she wasn’t upset.

“Okay,” she said out loud in the semi-darkness of the partially enclosed little toilet, “you’re allowed to be upset. It’s upsetting, sure, no one likes it. But you’re not gonna throw any kind of fit about it, girl, or cry, or be stupid. You knew this was gonna happen  _ some _ time.”

Still, she did raise up the handful of broad, flat leaves they used in lieu of toilet paper to look at it again, hoping that maybe a second glance would tell a different story. It did not. The leaves were still streaked with a distinctly reddish material. And she didn’t even need to  _ see _ , no she did not. The heavy ache in her abdomen and lower back told it all, really.

And if there wasn’t that, why, then all she had to do was think back to the last few days - that interlude with Eddie the other afternoon, in particular, should have been a warning sign. She’d wanted him so badly and so suddenly, but there was plenty else to blame it on.

She had probably started her monthly unexpectedly at worse times and in worse places than this, but just then, she was hard pressed to think of any. Here she was, out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a bunch of strange men, and not a belt or a pad in sight. What ladies in this sort of world even did, she couldn’t imagine. Stuffed leaves down their panties, maybe - if ladies in this world even wore panties. Maybe they wore bloomers.

Whatever they wore, though, they surely had some way of not just bleeding all over them. Susannah would have dearly loved to have another woman to speak to. As it was, though, she had to consider her options and narrow it down to the best out of the worst.

Roland was right out. She no more than thought of him as an option than her mind shied away from the idea in sheer horror, and she had no desire to explore that path further. If he’d been the only one there, maybe, but as it was - no.

Maybe Eddie would be more, well,  _ modern _ about it. For all she knew, men didn’t bat an eye about that sort of thing in his time. And he’d already been up in her business far more intimately than just knowing she had monthlies, which surely he would expect, being grown. At the same time, she wasn’t sure how much he’d be able to help, unless he was in the habit of carrying around feminine hygiene supplies.

Cuthbert seemed the most cosmopolitan of them all, though he’d surely have a smart remark or two. Maybe more, and maybe worse. Susannah was not entirely sure she could bear any saucy eyebrows about the subject just then.

Eddie and Cuthbert were off hunting, anyway, so it was either Roland or Alain. When she put the choice to herself that way, it was obvious.

Alain, then, was her best bet. He was quiet and knew how to keep to himself, with a practical bent that she appreciated. He would at the least be able to furnish her with a few spare rags to fold up and put in her underwear so she didn’t leave a trail of blood behind her.

Just as soon as she got herself under control, she would go to him. It made her feel childish, being so upset over such a natural and regular thing. But then, she wasn’t really upset so much as frustrated - it was a terribly inconvenient thing for her body to do, and she had never truly realized how much so until just that very moment, sitting on an improvised privy in a strange and worn-out world where nothing was familiar. She wasn’t silly enough to think it shameful that her body performed this act - this monthly alchemy of potential fertility into blood and pain, to bring about the next cycle - for, after all, it was what gave her the power to create life, was it not? For most of her life, after the novelty and strangeness had worn off, it had just become a routine occurrence. It simply was.

But having to go to one of these men and tell them what she needed -  _ why _ she needed it - to have to endure whatever reaction they might have, whatever squeamishness they might have been raised with - to feel so set apart, so inconveniently  _ female _ \- well, that shamed her, a bit. That made her a bit bitter towards her companions, who didn’t have to deal with such a thing.

“Put on your big girl pants and go deal with it,” she whispered to herself. She gave herself one more moment of self-pity for even having to deal with this mortifying situation, and then pulled her pants up, lowered herself off the privy seat, and began swinging herself back towards the home place.

Roland was there outside, walking up and down and around the hill. He did that every day, now, strengthening his legs and lungs. He raised a hand to hile her, and she paused to raise a hand back, then went on inside. As always, there was the customary period of adjustment. Her eyes had to get used to the dimness of the cave, and her nose had to get used to the close smells of human and cooking and smoke after the wide open outside air. 

Alain came ducking out from the back chamber, a pile of hides draped over one shoulder.  On his way to beat and air them out, likely. Everything in that chamber had a sour sick smell from Roland’s long illness, though now that he’d recovered well enough to start moving out for short periods of time, it was easier to try and keep it clean. This cramped little place might have been homey when it was just Alain and Cuthbert, but Susannah had an idea they were all starting to get a bit stir-crazy with the five of them crowded into it.

“Good day,” Alain said. “Do you need something?”

“Are you peeking into my mind again?” Having come to terms with the fact that he could do such, she wasn’t sure she liked how often he did. 

“No,” he said, smiling faintly, as if perhaps he’d picked up on that niggling sense of indignance she felt at the idea of him rummaging around in her mind. “You have a purposeful look about you.”

“Well, I’ve got a purpose, alright,” she admitted. Hedging a bit, she said, “I need some scrap rags, if you’ve got any around. Clean ones. That you aren’t gonna want back.”

His eyebrows rose. “I am sure I could hunt you up some, but whatever do you need them for?”

Although her skin was too dark to show a blush, she was still mortified at how hot her face grew. Still, she tried to be calm about it. They were all adults here, right? “Can I just say ‘woman problems’ and leave it at that?”

“Oh - oh, my, yes.” Alain, it turned out, was definitely fair enough to show a blush. He went slowly and spectacularly red as the meaning of her words became clear - but aside from that, at least reacted more like a grown man than a little boy. “I believe we’ve something of a bit more use than just a bundle of rags, as well, if you will give me a moment.”

So saying, he disappeared back into the bedroom. After a moment, Susannah swung herself in after him. Neither she nor Eddie came back there very often. It was a private space, and privacy was in precious short supply among their little band. Despite all the space around them, all the isolation of the wilderness, they were all constantly around each other and in each other’s business, even moreso than she had ever experienced when she lived in the city. There were no walls here, no sound-dampening, no doors to close. They only had the space that they intentionally made between each other.

Alain sat on the bed, one of their packs - the big and shapeless draw-string bags the gunslingers all three referred to as  _ purses _ , which never failed to amuse her - on his lap. He didn’t look up when she came in, but she knew he knew she was there. 

“There used to be a couple more of these, but of course we do try to re-use everything we can…” He emerged from the purse, finally, with a couple of objects, which he leaned over and handed to her. “Those are well-washed, of course, and haven’t been, uh, used for a long time. Try one and let me know if we need to take the waist out for you. You’re not so skinny, so -”

“Thanks,” she said dryly. Not so skinny as who, though, she did wonder. She held up one of the things - it looked like nothing so much as a jock strap with a wide and heavily padded crotch. The overall design reminded her of the cloth pads she used at home herself, though rather than needing to be clipped to a belt, it seemed to go around the wearer’s waist. The waistband wasn’t solid, but rather tied. She tried it on herself and found that, indeed, whichever woman they’d once traveled with had been quite a lot narrower in the hips than she was.

While Alain added onto the length of the waistband, she found herself wondering about that. They’d had a long and difficult time of it, that much was clear, and from the stories Cuthbert told over dinner each night, they’d lost a lot of people. Been alone for a long time, too. 

A menstrual pad was a slightly strange memento to keep around, but then again, if one of them had been in the habit of carrying supplies for someone and then she’d - well, died - or gone on - she could see a man of Alain’s practical nature making use of such scraps. If nothing else, men who got hurt as often as they seemed to could surely use something good for absorbing a lot of blood.

It was probably, she decided, best not to ask. None of them had ever mentioned a woman, but, well. It was hard to imagine that Cuthbert had spent his life unpartnered, and Roland was handsome in his own intense way, and Alain seemed like the kind of man any woman would love to make a life with - not wickedly attractive or smoldering or intense, no, but calm and steady and kind and good at housekeeping. Any one of them could have had a steady woman. If none of them wanted to bring it up, well, she wouldn’t pry, not about something like that.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Roll back the clock a little and let's see how ol' Roland is doing, shall we?

Roland didn’t remember the journey from the third door. He was aware, vaguely, of being sometimes awake - of being in great pain, of burning with fever, of a great clamor of far-off and incomprehensible voices - in the same way that he was aware of the dreams he had when he was asleep. Neither were pleasant.

He was -

in the desert again, baked dry by the merciless sun. Burning - the heat was inside him. The sun was inside him. Dust coated his lungs. He struggled to breathe, hacking up sticky clumps of it with every wracking, rattling cough. He was so desperately thirsty, but there was no water for him - no, water if God willed it, and God has not willed water on him in quite some time, no, God has willed him to fall and become dust in the desert where no mortal man had lain eyes in a hundred years -

Water on his lips. He forced his gummy eyes open. Above him loomed a face. Dark hair, foxy features - Bert, perhaps, although the man did not look much like Bert, and anyway Bert was gone, oh, woe, oh, Discordia, Bert was gone to the desert as well, and now Roland could only wish they might have spent their last moments together, that he might have had the comfort of his dearest friend’s hot, dry hand in his as they succumbed to desiccation -

“Bert,” he croaked, trying to hold onto this shade for as long as he can, trying to apologize.

“Nah,” said the man, “I’ve got ass-wiping duty tonight. Drink up, buddy.” Metal against his lips. Water in his mouth, tepid and dusty and leather-tasting but so blessedly cool and sweet even then. 

Roland closed his eyes, and drank, and was -

under the mountain. In the dark. Millions of tons of stone atop him, crushing all the air from his chest, weighing down his heart until it could not beat. He tried to breathe and could manage only a thin and whistling gasp. He tried to cry out and could not. There were people around; he could sense them, hear them, feel them moving nearby, but he could not get their attention. There was no voice in his throat any longer. Gone into the dark, just like all the rest of him. Just like the boy.

“Jake,” he whispered. He tried to lift an arm, but he could not. Perhaps he was a corpse already. Perhaps this was hell. Perhaps he would spend the rest of his existence trapped in the dark, surrounded by the restless ghosts of all those he’s led to their deaths.

A hand on his brow, smooth and warm. A cloth, then, wet and cool. A voice, so familiar, murmuring to him to be still, be calm, that he would be well soon enough and he must rest. A tranquil warmth wrapped around his jostling feverish thoughts. He tried to open his eyes - but he could not - he moaned the boy’s name again, knowing it could not be but hoping that somehow he could make it not have happened -  _ saved you _ , he thought with wild incoherence,  _ I didn’t let him push you, I saved you  _ -

_ Go then, there are other worlds than these. _ He falls -

he sat up. It took nearly all of his strength to do so. He reached out to support himself and touched bare stone, and a wave of gibbering terror crashed down on him. He was beneath the mountain again, he  _ was _ , he was in the dark, he was trapped alone there and he would never leave -

A rustle. Beside him, a body shifted. His fear receded, and in its place came awareness. He was in a cave, yes, but he was laying atop some firm sort of mattress covered in furs, not the bare and rocky ground. There was someone else beside him, who had been asleep but who his own movement had awoken.

“Roland.” Such a familiar voice - smooth and soft and deep. Alain’s voice. Dear Alain, who he had not thought to ever see again -

Familiar as his voice was the touch of Alain’s mind as it curled around his, soothing his worries. Though he had come through the worst and most insensate portions of his illness - and yes, now he could recognize the weakness of his body as illness, the heat in his flesh as fever - it seemed his mind was still given to wandering about like a frightened child awake at night, lost in the vast dark rooms of what during the day was a cozy and familiar home.

Alain put an arm around his shoulders. “Do not fret. You are safe and recovering well. Do you need something? Water to drink, or the privy? We ought not yet try you on solid food, I don’t think, but we’ve broth -”

Roland reached out, fumbling to find Alain’s chest, his shoulder. He threw his arms around his friend and let himself collapse into his strong chest. In the day, in front of witnesses, he might have held back this outpouring of feelings, but there in the dark, on the heels of the nightmares in which he’d steeped for the length of his illness, alone with this man who knew his own mind better than even he did, he did not even try. He wept. Alain wrapped him into a firm embrace and did not ask from where come his tear

“I need nothing,” Roland said finally, his voice a cracked whisper issuing from his ravaged throat. “Nothing save to know that I am alive and so are you.

“We are all alive,” Alain said. “Bert and I and the two you drew from the other world as well. They’re out in the other room.”

“And Bert is right here on the floor,” piped up another blessedly familiar voice from beside the bed, “having been usurped his rightful place and then awoken by your ballyhooing. Are you lucid now, Roland?”

“Lucid enough.” And exhausted, as well, from even this brief interlude of lucidity. He eased himself from Alain’s arms and laid back down, closing his eyes. Not that it made a difference. The darkness there was absolute, without even a glimmer of light - natural or otherwise - to brighten it. After his trip beneath the mountain, he did not care for such darkness, but the nearby presence of his friends did much to ease him.

\---

Once his fever broke, he recovered steadily, if not as quickly as he would have liked. Many and many-a time before in his long life had he been wounded, sometimes grievously, but he had never been taken so ill before. Even as a child he had been robust. The fevers and agues and chills which his classmates passed about to each other had never much afflicted him. It was therefore quite frustrating to be so relatively whole in his body, and yet still so helplessly weak.

During that time, he saw much of Alain and Cuthbert, and some of the other two as well. Not as much, though, which was by his own design.

“Keep them busy,” he’d told the both of his old companions the next day after he’d awoken in the night. Sitting up in their sturdily constructed bed during the daytime, there had been enough faint light filtering into the back of the cave for him to see their faces. He had met their eyes and held them, so they knew the importance of what he asked. “Train them. I am weak still, and they are from a soft world of grass-eaters. They’ve shown themselves well, both of them, but they’ll need to learn what we three know if they are to survive, and we do need them.”

Cuthbert had wanted to know why. Cuthbert always wanted to know why. Roland was sure that he would die with that question in his mouth. And though Alain had not said anything, it was clear in the way he looked at Roland that he, too, wondered what urgent need they had of such strange, soft folk. 

Roland himself wondered such. He did not know why he knew, only that he did. When he glanced inside himself, peeked at the mysterious inner workings of his own mind, he only knew that some voice said to him with grave assurance that he would need these three to succeed on his quest. 

“They were put here for me to find,” was the only answer Roland could give. “They are here now. They are our responsibility, now. Teach them.”

“Too many cooks spoil the broth,” Cuthbert had pointed out. “Shall we pull them in three directions, then, with our teaching?”

“We did have two teachers ourselves,” said Alain. “Many roads may lead to the same place. There are surely things they might come to learn from all three of us that one would not be able to show them.”

“You speak true, as always. So which of shall be Master Cort, then? I suppose I’ve the bad eye, though Alain’s got the bum leg - but you’ve the beard, Al, and the air of wisdom, so you shall be their Master Vannay.” Laughing, Cuthbert added, “I shudder to imagine what they will learn of sums or sciences at your hands, though!”

Mostly, as it shook out, it was Alain tending to Roland. For the first couple of weeks after he came through the worst of his illness, he was still far too exhausted to pay much attention to who was with him. He was mostly lucid, but at times the fever came back upon him. When he slept, sleep grasped at him with sticky hands and kept him from waking all the way, and he often confused his unhappy dreams with reality. At times he saw Alain and Cuthbert, but at others he saw the faces of their dead companions, of silent Jamie and gentle Thomas, of his father and his mother and his teachers, even of wily old Marten. He saw Jake often, and spoke to him, desperate to make amends. He saw Susan, and said nothing, for there was naught he could say or do which might make up for the fate he had brought upon her.

One day, though, he came out through the cave and into the outdoors, squinting his unaccustomed eyes against the light of the sun. He leaned on Alain’s shoulder, for his own legs - whole though they might be - were weak and wasted and not used to supporting his own weight. 

“The others have gone,” he noted. He had heard the babble of their voices when he’d awoken that morning, but the cave was empty when they walked through it, and neither did he catch any sight nor sound of them outside.

“Off doing target practice with Bert,” Alain said. “He has been training them on the sling to work on their aim. They’ll be gone most of the day, I suspect, or perhaps even until the morrow.” 

A silence fell between them. While Roland had surely, during the period of time he’d been alone, missed the sound of his friends’ voices, he had also missed how easy it was to be in Alain’s company and not speak. Though he had only been a handful of weeks alone, he still felt overwhelmed in the company of the others at times. 

Right then, though, he felt quite at peace. The air was clean and warm, the landscape empty but not desolate or dead the way the beach had been, and though his body ached and shook to be moved so, he took pleasure in being able to move. He simply walked about the hillside in which the cave was housed, taking in the lay of the land. There was no urgency, but neither did he feel adrift. No, he felt, now, a building sense of purpose and direction, like watching thunderheads pile up on the horizon. Soon the wind would shift and bring them rolling in, but at present there was only the sweet anticipation of such.

“They have taken well to it,” Alain said, after some time. “He’s quite pleased with them. He says they have the makings of gunslingers in them, and says you have told him much the same.” Though he did not ask a question, as such, Roland could hear it in his voice.

“They do at that. We need not be the last. They may protest, but the steel is there in both of them.” Spotting a likely looking stone, Roland stepped over to it and then sat down, stretching his legs out before him. “Have you any feelings about them, Alain? I have wanted to bring them into your company since I met them, for surely this whole matter is more your wheelhouse than mine own. It all...  _ Portends _ , I suppose, but I am deaf as ever to such messages.

Alain shrugged. “It is hard to say. They feel quite strange, the both of them, and yet familiar. I can feel the force of ka at work, joining the two of them to us. That we are meant to be tet is apparent, but for what reason, I could not say. But if you mean to ask whether I have received any prophecy of them, then the answer is no. My dreams are quite mundane of late.”

“I had wondered that, yes.” Roland nodded and leaned back, looking up at the sky. “Do you avoid them? I have not noticed you much in their company.” It was good that they seemed to be getting on well with Bert, but then, Bert got along well with nearly everyone. As always, Roland trusted Cuthbert’s understanding of people as much as his own, for he knew that it was deeper, that there was something in Cuthbert which reached out towards others and which they reached out to in turn, something he could not name or reproduce in his own self. 

He held Alain’s opinion in just as high an esteem. Alain did not open himself easily. There was in him an in-born sense of caution which gregarious Cuthbert wholly lacked. If he had some ill feeling about either of the two that Roland had drawn - well, Roland supposed Cuthbert would notice as well in time, or have already noticed and filed it away in his mind and gone right on ahead behaving as he always did - then Roland wished to know.

Alain shrugged again, and glanced away sheepishly. “I suppose I have been. It is not out of any dislike nor ill feeling, though. I am simply not much used to the company of others anymore.”

Indeed, he had never been comfortable around strangers, even before they three had spent so long alone together. Roland thought, too, of the cave that he had seen, how heavily lived-in it looked. Nature may have made the place, but over the last decade, Alain and Cuthbert’s hands had shaped it. “It has been only you and Bert here for a long time, hasn’t it?”

“A very long time.” Now Alain smiled, slightly, still looking into the distance. A very fond smile, it was. “We had begun to fear you would not return while the two of us were still alive, in truth. Or that perhaps we would still live, but be too old and feeble to come with you. I am glad it’s not the case.”

“I am as well.” But Roland could not help the cold and practical part of himself from running an appraising eye over Alain, nor could he silence what it thought. And that was that Alain did not seem well-suited for the rigors of the upcoming journey, not at all. He was not so old - Roland could remember the days of his own callow youth, and how even when he’d thought himself terribly mature and worldly, he had still been so very young. He could remember a time when such an age as fifty was unthinkably ancient. 

They had not, after all, died gloriously in the prime of their youth. Jamie and Thomas had, aye, but they three had limped along, battered by war and sapped of vitality by each passing year. And now Alain stood before him: broad and hearty and heavily muscled, stout and strong as a bear, no doubt, and yet: bent a little by the way he leaned to keep the weight off his bad leg, and limping heavily, and with more silver than gold in his hair and beard, and with a softness and a stumbling to his speech that Roland had not ever heard before.

Old, in other words. Old and wounded. Older in body, perhaps, than Roland himself felt.

“You needn’t send me off to the knackers just yet,” Alain said, smiling a crooked smile very like Cuthbert’s. It was a Cuthbert thing to say, as well, which took some of the sting from the rebuke. “I was well enough to cross the Mohaine and come to this place and survive here all these years, was I not?”

“Do you send them out with Bert to hunt and gather and learn the ways of the land because you fear you are too infirm to teach them?”

A long silence followed that, during which Roland regretted, somewhat, the bluntness with which he had asked the question. All the same, he needed to know. Not for anything would he leave Alain behind, but he had to know where things stood before they left.

“I mean no offense,” he added. Holding up his own mutilated right hand, he said, “I am not whole either. I suppose among us, only Eddie is, now. Let us be frank with each other, at least.” 

It seemed such a small thing, really. Just two fingers. In the grand scheme of things, ranked among all the other injuries he’d suffered, what harm was two fingers? Surely he had been more grievous wounded after Jericho Hill. Surely he had come closer to dying in the grips of the Wizard’s Grapefruit. Surely he had felt more pain when he’d been flogged, not once but three times over the course of his long life. And yet in one snap of a monstrosity’s serrated beak, he had been cast back to fumbling toddlerhood.

“We have settled into a routine,” Alain said slowly. “I stay mostly at home, ‘tis true, and it is mostly Bert who goes out. I could do what he does. I’m the better shot now, in truth. But he is more whole in his body. I could do what he does, but far more slowly, and with much more pain. There has not been any need for it between the two of us, save for a time or two when he was laid up.” He turned his gaze from the empty distance and met Roland’s eyes squarely. “I am well enough to come along with you and carry my own weight, Roland, that I do promise you.”

“I do not doubt it. I do not ask because I worry we will have to carry you, old friend. And even if we did, well, it would be well worth it. I only need to know. Our journey will be hard enough, and I don’t wish to push any of us past our endurance.”

“Perhaps this is what your otherworldly two bring us,” said Alain with a wry twist to his tone. “The freshness of their minds and the heartiness of their bodies. They are very young, both of them.”

“Perhaps it is so,” Roland agreed. Leaning forward, he held out a hand - his left, for the right still hurt fiercely if touched wrong. His missing fingers itched and burned. 

Alain clasped Roland’s hand in his own and hauled him upright. Clearly, he had not been idle enough over the last few years to have lost any of his impressive strength. “Shall we walk a bit further, or are you tired out?”

“Another lap around the hill, and then I wish to return. Not to bed, though.” He flexed his right hand, ignoring the flare of pain and the stiffness of the muscles. “I am glad to have some time alone with you, for you’ve ever had the deftest hands among us three, and I must needs train my left to take up the slack of my right. Do you remember those silly string games you always used to play as a boy?”

“Oh, yes.” Alain clapped him solidly on the back. “I remember you were fairly rubbish at them even when you had two working hands, too.”

\---

“Cuthbert,” Roland asked quietly, his gaze not straying from the two apprentices standing in front of them, “I have a question, if you would.”

“And what sort of question is it, then, that you must ask me if you can ask? Is it a subject fit for mixed company?” Neither did Cuthbert look away. After having proven their handiness with the sling, Eddie and Susannah had been graduated to dry-firing the grand old gunslinger revolvers. They each bore one of Roland’s, for at present he had no more use of them than would one of the ever-present seabirds.

Cuthbert could likely have handled them on his own, but Roland was eager for any excuse to get out of the cave. He craved the warmth of sunlight and the fresh outside air, even with its salt and kelp sea-stink. As the broths and stews his companions cooked had nourished his body back to strength, so did being beneath the open sky nourish some vital inside part of him.

“Just an odd one, I suppose.” He had not ever asked much about Cuthbert’s injuries, save to assure himself his friend still lived and could go on as a gunslinger. And he’d never lost a body part himself until just recently. Lowering his voice even further so the two practicing nearby would not hear, he asked, “Do you ever still feel as if your eye is there?”

Such secrecy was, truly, not likely necessary. Eddie and Susannah were quite focused on their exercises, and the ever-present sweeping wind and distant crash of the waves served well enough to drown out such incidental conversation. Still, although they had seen him so sick as to be helpless, Roland did not like to admit the extent of his ongoing weakness to them. As their teacher, he needed to present an image of rock-steady strength.

Now Cuthbert did glance over at him, eyebrow raised. “An odd question indeed. As to the answer, I used to quite often. I felt as if I’d gotten glass stuck in it for months at a time after the battle, or as if I had held it open too long staring at something bright, but could not blink to wet it again. It doesn’t happen so often anymore.” As always, he was quick to guess why - his gaze dropped down to Roland’s mutilated hand, then rose back up to Roland’s face. “Do your missing fingers bother you?”

“Terribly,” Roland admitted. “I feel as if they are clenched and cramped and cannot be straightened. It’s very odd.”

“I imagine it will pass in time. Why, at times I go whole minutes forgetting there’s a hole in my own face.” Cuthbert reached out and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “How goes training your dumb hand, then? Alain’s been quite smug about his superior dexterity of late. It’s good of you to give the old fellow something to feel good about.”

“It’s been -” But he cut himself off, and strode forward. Eddie and Susannah, on the whole, were quick to learn and already quite adept. They each had their own flaws, though. Eddie’s stance tended to be too loose, almost casual - Roland thought perhaps it was an imitation of the way he thought a gunslinger ought to be, for he’d seen harriers trying to look tough pull the same sort of move. True confidence came with true experience, of course. The fluid ease with which he or Cuthbert or Alain might pull and fire a gun had nothing to do with carelessness and everything to do with years of knowledge.

He touched Eddie’s shoulder, and then put a hand to his elbow and shifted the angle of his arm. “If you fire a live round like that, Eddie, you’ll drop the gun, and God himself only knows where the bullet might go. Hold yourself steady and let your arm and hand make the path to where the bullet ought to land.”

“Hey, man, I don’t want to choke up, right? You guys keep getting on Suze for that.” The protest seemed to simply be a way of moving his mouth. Eddie adjusted as Roland urged him to, and though he did not say anything, Roland could watch him realize how much more in line with the target the adjustment brought him.

“Susannah tends to hold too much tension, it is true. Her form right now is excellent, though.” And she was faster on the draw than Eddie, too, with a keener eye. Years ago, he had scoffed at the idea of a female gunslinger, but were he forced to choose between the two of them as students, well -

“You gotta find that sweet spot, Mister Dean,” Susannah said, cocking her eye up towards the two of them somewhat mischievously. “Seems like you’re feeling good today, Roland.”

“Don’t get distracted, now,” Roland cautioned her. “But I am recovering well, yes. The two of you seem to have progressed quite far under Bert’s tutelage.”

“Why, ‘twas nothing much,” called Cuthbert. “I simply think of old Master Cort and ask myself what he would do or say in any situation, and then I do the opposite of that. It’s worked out splendidly, as you can see. I daresay neither one of them dreams of running into me alone in a dark alley!”

“He’s been telling us war stories,” Eddie said. Despite Roland’s admonition to Susannah, he was clearly quite distracted. He dropped the gun down to his side and turned to look back at the gunslingers, eyebrows raised. “Your old teacher sounds like a real peach. I’m surprised you guys never mutinied.”

Frowning, Roland said, “Turn your eyes back to your lesson, Eddie Dean. Cortland Andrus was a fine teacher. If he was harsh, it was because he knew the world would be harsher with us than ever he could be.”

“I’m just saying,” Eddie said as he turned back to the targets they’d set up some yards out, “that if I were teaching a bunch of guys to kill stuff, I wouldn’t beat ‘em around like that. Accident waiting to happen, man.”

“Young ‘prentices need a stern hand. And Bert was in need of a sterner hand than most.”

“I did misbehave  _ dreadfully _ ,” Cuthbert put in, every bit as unrepentant now as he had been during his boyhood. “Roland’s father used to say old Cort had to beat me twice as much to make up for my own da never doing it.” He shot a quick grin Roland’s way. “He never thought he said it where I could hear, but well, I did say I misbehaved. Eavesdropping was only the least of my sins.”

“Beating kiddies,” Susannah said dryly, “is not generally reckoned to be a good educational method.”

“Perhaps in your world,” Roland said. In truth he could not imagine such a world. That some folk were too soft to discipline their children, that he knew - Robert Allgood had been famously permissive of his wild and mouthy son, and quite content to leave his punishment to harder hands. It might have spared Bert some blood and tears had he been given a good hiding or two when he was younger, before he’d gotten it into his head that he could always have his way, but then again, it might not have. He’d been unusual for it, though. “Ours moved on long ago, though, and the sons of Gilead were raised to a harder life.”

“Well, I’m just glad you guys aren’t smacking us around,” said Eddie. “It’d really like, sour relations, I think.”

“Oh, no, perish even the thought, Eddie!” said Cuthbert. “One might strike a child to reprimand, ‘tis true, but to hit a grown man is to invite a fight, and as for beating women about, well, the less said of those who do that sort of thing the better. Now!” He clapped his hands sharply. “We have gotten quite distracted, and we’ve only another hour or so of good light.”

Behind their backs, he made a face at Roland. “You see,” he said quietly, full of good humor, “I can be as much a taskmaster as I need to be, when I wish. And -” he shifted closer and dropped his voice even further, his eye gone very dark and intense, “I do wish to say, that if you ever wish to work your fingers out, well, I’ve got some delicate bits that could use fiddling about with.”

“Hush your dirty mouth,” Roland muttered back, giving his shoulder a push, “and watch your ‘prentices.”

All the same, he recalled those words that night as he lay sandwiched between Bert and Alain. Their bed had been made large, but it was still a snug fit for all three of them. Weak as he still was, and focused on the training of the new apprentices as he was, he tried to push the thought away. It was no time for such frivolities.

But Bert was right there, warm and sleepy but not quite all the way asleep beside him. He had been so dreadfully certain that the both of them were dead, that he was wholly alone. There were still times when he awoke - fewer now, but not none - to Cuthbert gone and Alain in the other room or out about the land, and feared it had all been some awful dream until he saw one or the other of them. He was well enough to sleep out in the room with Eddie and Susannah, or on the floor so the two of them might have what little privacy they could, but he still took selfish comfort in their touch.

And his desire was there, yes. So he shifted over onto his side and touched Bert’s face, then drew the tips of his left-hand fingers down Bert’s neck, his chest, his belly - down between his slim thighs, which parted welcomingly for him. Alain put a hand on Roland’s own hip, heavy and warm, and his lips to the side of Roland’s neck, and watched as Roland did clumsily with his dumb left hand what his right had known with intimate and fluid grace for years.

It was a much more pleasant method of exercising his muscles, and Bert, at least, a very patient teacher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't think Bert is very fond of Cort at all. Roland credits him with having made him the man he is today, but I like to imagine Cuthbert recalls his harsh treatment more negatively, and is a bit excited to try and teach some prospective gunslingers his own way.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short and sweet! The end of one thing and the beginning of another.

He knew, after that, that this quiet time of recovery and learning was drawing to a close. If he was well enough for such desires, he was well enough to travel. Still he dawdled in saying such. It was a peaceful place, here. Alain and Cuthbert had built something between the two of them, something they’d never been able to have before, and as much as the presence of it made him uneasy - for he was not a part of it anymore than he had been a part of their growing relationship all those years ago, when they’d been boys and such concerns had been of dire importance to them all - he was also loathe to put an end to it. Just by being near it, he felt more at peace.

He felt, in fact, almost as if he might throw over his quest. Impossible, unthinkable - and yet the thought kept coming to him. They could build onto the place so that Eddie and Susannah might have their own space, and him his own as well. They could live comfortably here until their natural span of years ran out. He could turn his hand to creating, to tilling the soil and digging up roots and gathering greens. He could -

He could roust them all from this rut before inertia set in. Moreover, he had to. The Tower beat in his brain every day. It pulled him like a lodestone, tugging at the iron in his blood. If he stayed here, it might be in peace, but he would go slowly mad.

Already, he felt it. The world slipped out of kilter with itself at times. In the middle of the night he would come gasping awake, sure that he was in the desert by himself, beneath the mountain by himself. At those times there would be such a sense of wrongness, so vast it made him shudder. There would be a sense of forgetting.

At times he woke instead from a nightmare of being with someone, of a pale face falling into the dark, of a voice that spoke words he could almost remember.  _ Go then - _

He said nothing of it. Perhaps Cuthbert noticed a change in his behavior, though it was easy enough to attribute that to his illness. Perhaps Alain felt something in his mind, but he did not ask. Eddie and Susannah did not know him well enough to know.

On the day that Susannah and Bert encountered the monstrosity in the woods, although he did not yet know, a pall hung over him nonetheless. That morning he had been awoken by Alain’s uneasy sleep, and when finally the nightmare had subsided enough that he felt safe taking Alain by the shoulder and shaking him, he’d been treated to a disjointed recounting of a dream which sounded portentous indeed.

That had weighed him down. He’d tried to put it out of his mind and see to Eddie’s lessons in Cuthbert’s absence, but it had been plain enough. He’d been distracted and edgy, and even Eddie had seen.

When finally Bert and Susannah came back, one look at their faces was enough to tell that something had happened. What Roland feared, he did not know. There were perils aplenty now in this world, more every day, it seemed. The fabric of reality was thin and full of holes. Monsters were the rule now, rather than the exception.

Not even his pleasure at Susannah’s fine showing could quite ease his sense of anxiety. As soon as was possible, he sent her and Eddie away, and gathered his friends to him.

“It’s time,” he said, simply. No need to explain what he meant. They understood, although he could see by the set of their faces that they didn’t like it. “We gain no more by sitting here.”

“So you are quite recovered then, Ro?” asked Bert. “You look a bit peaky to me, still, and I daresay you’d struggle to write your own name -”

“I needn’t write my own name, though. I can shoot just fine, and I’m well enough to walk a full day and make camp.” It wouldn’t be pleasant, but he would get no stronger languishing in bed, nor going for day-trips around the flat plain. “By your account, Bert, Susannah is quite ready, and I judge it time to move Eddie up to practicing with live ammunition as well. I’ve a trove of shells from the other world for them to work with. It’s time.”

“When shall we leave?” asked Alain. “Tonight?”

Roland rubbed a hand up his cheek. “Not tonight, no. Today and tonight we take stock of what we wish to bring and what we must leave behind. Tomorrow perhaps, or the day after, or maybe in two days’ time. There is no need to go running off into the wild, though we oughtn’t dawdle.”

And, although he did not say so, it would give Alain and Cuthbert time to let go of the place where they had lived the last ten years. Practical though he was, Roland understood sentiment. There was a streak of it all through him, and more than that to Cuthbert. He did not wish to make the separation too abrupt, but neither did he wish to draw it out needlessly. So, mentally, he decided that they would have two days or perhaps three, and then they would go.

“We can get started with our inventory now, and when Susannah and Eddie get back, we can tell them.”

\---

It did not take three days. It hardly took one. Over ten years, a body collected a lot of clutter, but there wasn’t much they could take with them on their backs. None of the furniture, of course - obvious, but Alain felt it keenly, for he’d hauled most of the raw stumps and logs back to the cave, and Bert had carved them slowly over the years into what they were now. Most of the tools they’d made themselves over the years would prove quite useful on the road, and so those they kept. The makeshift dishes, likewise. 

_ All _ of the clothing proved to be too much. It surprised Alain, when they began going through it, just how much they actually had. They took along a couple of outfits’ worth for each of them, and some extras besides, and cut up some of the older and more ragged clothes for rags. Most of the furs were too bulky to take along, but Alain did insist on bringing the bear.

Their stores of food, such as they were. Alain’s dwindling supplies of medicine. Those of his books which had survived the trek across the desert and the last ten years. All of their soap, which Cuthbert took a particular delight in imbuing with different scents. Their needles, the few good steel ones and the cruder ones carved of bone; the thread which over the years he painstakingly worked on spinning out of gut, out of grass fibers, out of threads of old cloth teased apart and then twisted back together. Bits and bobs, and of course the things they’d come to this place with, the few bullets they had left and their fathers’ guns and those things which had survived their long exile.

And that was it. Ten years lived together, and in the end it came down to what five people could carry on their backs. 

Alain had known - had  _ hoped _ \- that this day would come. From the moment Roland had went his own way across the desert, Alain had hoped they would meet again and continue their quest. It should not have been so difficult. He should have been excited, eager to go on. Cuthbert was, even though he had grown attached as well. But then, Bert had always been a wandering soul. 

Once the packing up was done, Alain took his leave of the cave and climbed atop the hill to sit and stare out over the land. He lay back and closed his eyes and let his mind expand. 

The wet and salty sea-breeze blew steadily in from the water and the tall and summer-golden grass waved and rustled and whispered with it. Beneath the soil the roots connected, spanning the whole stretch of scrub meadow. Among the stalks of grass and shrubs, a cacophony of insects skittered and crawled and climbed and burrowed. Beneath the ground were rabbit warrens, mouse holes. Grouse huddled in their nests in the roots of the hardy, waxy-leafed shrubs. 

Eddie and Susannah and Roland and Cuthbert were very bright in his awareness in the cave just below. He breathed in the night air and breathed himself slowly out. He envisioned himself as a tree and imagined pulling up his roots, one by one. So deeply were they sunk into this thin and stony soil! It had happened piecemeal over the years, without him even noticing, and now all at once he had to leave.

Ever since the fall of Gilead, he had been adrift. At times he and his companions had dawdled, for days or weeks or even months. Sometimes they had stayed to gather support, or to stage a fight, or to give aid and succor. Sometimes they had been hurt. Sometimes they had simply been weary and trailworn. Always, though, they had left again. 

This place had become a home, the only one he’d known since the city of his birth had been destroyed. He would not, he knew, see its like again. Perhaps it was a premonition, perhaps simply mundane understanding that the journey was perilous and long, that he was old, and that any number of things could happen. He would not give up the chance to come along for anything, but he knew that he would never see this place nor feel this sort of peace again.

The certainty that he would die along the way did not trouble Alain. He was not eager to throw away his own life, but neither did he fear death. How could he, when death and the knowledge of death were the most constant companions he had ever had? 

No, the hard part was giving up this place. This peace. The illusion that he had happily let himself live for the last ten years that he and Cuthbert might measure out their span of years together in quiet domesticity. Foolish to fall so deeply into it, he knew - and limiting, as well. Cuthbert, at least, would never be happy with such a life. He was meant for a glorious death, was Bert, not a slow dwindling in a cave at the end of the world.

Alain took in a breath and opened his eyes. Above him sprawled the vault of the heavens, dotted with thousands upon thousands upon thousands of glittering stars. For each point of glinting light above there was a spark of life below, and between them he was held, a man-thing, a being that walked upon the fabric of the world and looked upon the fabric of the heavens but belonged to neither. A mind capable of longing for the stars inside a body bound to the earth. A vessel made from dust which would in time return to the dirt.

Their time here had, after all, been less than a blink to the earth and the skies. The stars would not notice their absence. Nature would reclaim the things they had crudely forged for their own use. A cat might den in their cave, or a family of foxes, or even a bear from the forest. It was not theirs, for all the sense of ownership he felt. Long after he was dead and gone and rotted, this place would remain. 

He sat up slowly, propping himself up on his hands. Put next to the span of geological time, his own short attachment was small and unimportant. Seeing it as such made it easy to let it go.

With that worry gone, however, others crowded in. One stood above the others, larger and louder. Despite his assurances to Roland the other day, he was not at all sure of his own suitability for the journey. That he could walk along with them and bear his own weight, he knew. That his hands knew their killing business with the guns, he knew. That he was just as deadly with a thrown knife or his heavy staff, stiff enough to crack open skulls, he knew. 

His body was crippled. It was infirm. It suffered all the pains the flesh might come to suffer. But now, in a queer reversal of the way things had been his entire life, it was his mind for which he truly feared.

His hip still ached and shifted about unsteadily in its socket from time to time. The shaking fit which had sent him falling to the ground and pushed it out of place had, luckily, gone unnoticed. He had an idea that Cuthbert did not entirely believe his deflections about how he had come to fall, but other events seem to have pushed that worry out of Bert’s mind, and he was in no hurry to bring it back. 

There had been a second when Cuthbert was still out on the beach, bringing Roland and the two new ones back. When he’d reached out to try and find the woman, and brushed against the mind of her  _ other _ , she had lashed out as suddenly as a striking snake and thrown him back into his body. The shock of it had brought on another fit, thankfully a smaller one, which had not done him any harm.

But now his mind was like a net with holes in it. No critical thread had yet been severed, and the overall structure was still firm, and he had been able to patch it up enough to keep using, but under enough strain, he feared the whole thing would unravel. Such instances of infirmity - the headaches, the fits, the queer wandering where his mind simply floated free of his body and could not find its way easily back - had become more and more frequent. He expected such, for it was common enough with the touch, but oh, what a damned inconvenient time for it to happen!

What he feared, above all, was that this growing weakness would be revealed to his companions during their travels. He would be exhausted in his body and called upon to use the powers of his mind to aid them, and he would not be able to explain away a shaking fit if it happened in sight of all of them.

“Water if God wills it,” he said to himself softly. It would happen as it happened. He would reach the Tower or he wouldn’t. His companions would find out when it became necessary.

He pulled himself to his feet, leaning heavily upon his staff, and made his slow and careful way back down the hill. Inside the other four were all eating together, and for this last night of companionship in the place which had been his home, he would join them. It was his duty to his ka-tet to worry about the future, for none of them could touch it the way he could, but for just that evening he would put it from his mind.


	15. Chapter 15

After dinner, as had become custom, they sat around the fire and traded stories. Sometimes they riddled, but tonight Cuthbert told a tale. He sat against Alain’s side and recounted some tale of misadventure from their childhoods, while Alain looked into the fire and tried to keep a grip on his sanity. The world kept trying to fracture and slide apart into two halves.

There was a boy. There was  _ not _ a boy. There was - there had been a boy, yes, only he had -

gone on -

Only he had -

fallen -

Only he had -

_ been dropped _ -

Only he had -

Never existed in the first place, there had never been a boy, he knew that, didn’t he know that? 

And yet he remembered the boy. And yet he knew there was no boy. Had never been a boy. And yet he saw the pale face falling, the reaching hand - his own hands reaching out to push, the pusher’s hands, a monster’s hands, and he had not been able to stop himself from pulling back, no, had not even thought about it, because -

Because he wanted to do right this time -

No, there had been no time before. There had never been a boy. He had stopped the pusher from reaching out because he would not be party to such a foul deed, not when he had any ability to stop it. Soaked with blood though his hands were, he had never killed for simple pleasure.

He had never killed for pleasure, no, but he had brought death, he had let the boy fall to his -

_ Death, gunslinger, but not for you. Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May I be brutally frank? You go on _

_ then, there are other worlds than these - _

Alain squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his fist to his temple. A sick ache throbbed inside his skull, up from his back teeth and behind his eyes, from ear to ear. The meat he had so recently eaten sat in a leaden lump in his guts, ready to come back up in a rush of bile at the slightest provocation. 

A touch. An arm slid through his, a head on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and glanced over, to see Bert with his head cocked, cheek resting on his shoulder, fluttering his eyelashes winsomely up at him.

“My dear,” he crooned in an exaggerated, syrupy tone, “we were punished handsomely for it, ‘tis true, but surely the memory does not so unman you? Would you prefer I recount a tale of triumph, then?”

Beneath the amusement of his voice and the dumb-show of his actions, there was concern. He knew the signs of Alain’s distress well enough.

The distraction was enough to bring Alain back to himself. He mustered every ounce of control he had and slammed his mental walls up, tight as he could make them. All around him the world went flat and dull and lifeless and silent, but that awful sense of dislocation left as well. He looked around the fire, for now everyone was looking at him. He knew the faces before him, some better than others, but the expressions they bore were strange almost to the point of being grotesque. Even Bert, when he looked down into that beloved and familiar face, looked nearly a stranger to him.

“I am well,” he said. His own voice was queer to his ears. It echoed unpleasantly in the chamber of his skull. “Merely a headache. Cry pardon, but I believe I’ll turn in early.”

He did not want to leave Bert’s touch, but neither did he want to sit there as he was, and neither did he want to open himself up again. He drew himself away and went to lay out his bedroll on the edge of camp, and settled himself in. The strange and lonely sense of utter disorientation that came with shutting himself off from his touch was easier to bear on his own like that.

Behind him he could hear the voices of the others. In this state their otherworldly accents made it so that he could hardly understand the words they spoke, but he understood well enough when Bert replied that he commonly suffered from headaches and ‘twas naught to worry over.

He had begun to drift to sleep in truth when a warm body settled in beside him, a hand lit on his chest, and Bert’s voice said, in just a bare whisper, “Now what was all that about, then? Is something wrong?”

Alain opened his eyes. The fire had burned down, and no longer were the others sat around it. Eddie and Susannah had taken themselves off to one edge of the camp - together, as they had been for some time - while Roland lay near the gently flickering fire. Cautiously, Alain loosed his grasp on his touch, not all the way but just enough. That overwhelming sense of wrongness was still there, but less, and he could keep it out. With a sigh of relief, he let down the defensive walls he’d put up, and let his mind touch Cuthbert’s, reveling even in his worry, so glad was he to feel that sense of connection once more.

He, too, was worried. “Something is wrong,” he whispered back. “Not with me, though. Something is wrong with Roland.”

\---

Cuthbert squatted on his hunkers, hands dangling between his legs, head cocked as Eddie - with an almost comical air of concentration - lit the fire. He’d built it up himself, too, with only minimal guidance. The end result was a bit lopsided, but good enough. 

A spark jumped from the flint into the fire and burrowed in. A curl of smoke rose and thickened, and soon enough the glow of the growing fire could be seen.

Roland, on Eddie’s other side, clapped him on the shoulder. “Well done, Jake.”

Cuthbert stiffened. Alain had told him what he knew of the divide within Roland’s mind. That knowledge didn’t amount to much: there was - or was not - a boy, with whose existence - or lack thereof - Roland was deeply concerned. When he had met the boy or what had happened or why he was so concerned with him, Alain could not say, because any attempt to poke around in Roland’s poor strained mind for more details risked Alain falling into the fracture himself. He had, though, been able to pull out the name  _ Jake. _

“Yeah,” Eddie said, practically glowing. For a moment, the pleasure of having earned Roland’s rare praise distracted him, but Cuthbert saw the exact moment he realized he’d been called a name that was not his own. “It’s pretty good, only, hey - who’s Jake?”

Roland frowned. “I don’t know, Eddie. I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“You just called me that, though. Some old friend of yours?”

“I  _ don’t know _ anybody by that name,” Roland insisted. “I never have, that I can recall.” Abruptly, he stood and stalked off to the edge of camp, one hand rising to rub at the side of his cheek.

Eddie looked after him, then turned to Cuthbert. “The hell was that about?”

Though his insides were knotting themselves together fretfully, Cuthbert put an easy smile on his face and shrugged. “A slip of the tongue, mayhaps. You’ll have to forgive him. We’re all old fellows, Eddie, prone to wandering.” Which was quite untrue, and Eddie knew, so before he could say anything to that effect, Cuthbert added, “You did do quite well with the fire. Let me show you, though - here and here, do you see how closely stacked the kindling is? As it burns, the air won’t reach, and it’ll die out earlier than it ought to. Tomorrow night you’ll lay it better.”

Every part of him wanted to go to Roland immediately. Instead he went about showing Eddie how to make dinner. The man had a terrible lack of any useful skills whatsoever, aside from his budding knowledge of the guns. How to gather useful kindling, lay a fire, follow trail, hunt, even cook - all of this they had to teach Eddie and Susannah both. To their credit, at least, the two were quick studies and not afraid of getting their hands dirty.

As he was showing Eddie the difference between a handful of herbs and naming where each could be found, Alain came over. It took him some time to settle himself on the ground, bad leg outstretched near enough the fire to feel the growing heat.

“Ho there, Al,” Cuthbert called. “Roland is evidently in a solitary sort of mood tonight, so I’m teaching Eddie to be of some use. I think he’s just about got boiling water down.”

“You know,” said Eddie, “one of these days we’re gonna have to deal with some fucked up supercomputer or like, action movie sequence where we gotta disarm a bomb, and while you guys are all shitting yourselves ‘cause you think computers are witchcraft, I’m gonna save the day, and you’re gonna be real sorry for giving me shit all the time.”

While Eddie spoke, Alain glanced over at Roland, then back at Cuthbert, eyebrows raised. Cuthbert inclined his head in a slight nod. 

“You’re likely right,” said Alain softly. “We’re far beyond the boundaries of the world any of us three know. There was old technology even where we came from that none knew how to use, which perhaps you might. It’s likely part of why you’re with us

“See, Eddie,” said Susannah, directing a soft and fond smile at Eddie from across the fledgling fire, “I always knew you were more than a pretty face.”

“Oh yeah,” said Eddie, raising up his fist to flex his skinny bicep, “that’s me, your friendly neighborhood technomancer.”

“And there you go,” said Cuthbert, “we all have a purpose. Eddie can set a fire and perform arcane magicks on machines, Susannah here is a mighty quick draw, and Alain, why, naturally he’s here to make vaguely portentous pronouncements.

With a faint, indulgent smile, Alain asked, “And what of yourself?”

“Why,” Cuthbert responded, in all seriousness, “of course I’m here to be the pretty face. You surely did not think that was your purpose?” Nudging Eddie’s side with his elbow, he added, “He’s as handy about the house as one could want, but don’t ever let him try and teach you how to cook.”

“No good at it?”

“Not at all.” Cuthbert shook his head dolefully. “You’d think a fat man ought to be a good cook, wouldn’t you? But he’s no taste for it, none at all, no touch for the savory intricacies. Food is merely fuel for the body, says our dear Alain, and naught of fueling the soul through stimulation of the earthly appetites.”

“And thus I leave it to you,” Alain said dryly, opening a hand towards the simmering cookpot. “For you feel so artful about it.”

“And thus he gets me to do the work,” Cuthbert repeated to Eddie, tone conspiratorial. 

Before he could say more, Roland came back over and sat down near Susannah. Though he said nothing, his presence nonetheless effectively quashed the conversation. With him came a lowering sense of heaviness. He tried to affect a position of ease, but tension was evident in every line of him, and his truncated right hand kept rubbing steadily at his cheek, rasping faintly against the stubble there.

Susannah shot him a troubled look, though soon enough her face smoothed out. That she noticed was, on the one hand, good - it meant she was learning to see with her eyes. That it was that obvious, though, Cuthbert did not like at all. Nor did he like the way he could see her deciding to keep her own counsel about it for the nonce. It wouldn’t do for the two new members of their ka-tet not to feel as if they could trust the others, especially not Roland.

But it wouldn’t do for him to say aught about it at that very moment, and so he did not. Instead he did his best to pull Roland out of his own troubled thoughts and into conversation. That was difficult at the best of times, and near impossible with Roland so focused on the awful divide in his own mind, but Cuthbert was nothing if not determined.

\---

After dinner that night, he struck. Once Eddie and Susannah were off to bed, Cuthbert made his way to where Roland sat in front of the fire, staring blankly into it, and crouched beside him.

“Roland.” There was no response. Raising his voice, Cuthbert tried again, and then reached out to grasp Roland’s shoulder.

Roland tensed beneath the unexpected touch and whipped around to glare at him. It was less anger at being dragged out of his thoughts, Cuthbert was sure, and more to cover his own fear that he hadn’t noticed someone - even a fellow gunslinger - coming up so close to him until they’d touched him.

“We would speak with you,” Cuthbert said softly, once he was sure he had his dinh’s attention, “Alain and I.”

Roland glanced pointedly about. Alain was not there. Having discussed this plan with Cuthbert previously, he’d made vague mention of an errand to be done out in the woods after dinner - obvious enough what was meant, so neither of the other two would question or try to follow - and gone to a spot nearby enough they wouldn’t be missed but far enough away that they wouldn’t be overheard. 

“Elsewhere,” Cuthbert added. He stood, holding his hand out to Roland. “Come.”

Without taking the proffered hand - also quite pointedly - Roland stood. “This has a feel to it I do not like,” he said, not quite in a normal tone but not whispering either. Pushing to see how secretive Cuthbert was trying to be, no doubt. “What for is this skulking about?”

“You know very well what for.” Cuthbert led him into the dark woods, towards Alain. The light of their fire could be seen from the meeting place, but did not offer much illumination. He didn’t need light to find his way to Alain; he was simply drawn there, knowing already which was the correct way. Romantic though it sounded, he knew it was simply the touch guiding him. And soon enough Alain came into sight, a hulking dark shape amongst the stiller, taller trees.

“And how long,” Roland asked, once they were all three standing within sight of each other, “have the two of you been planning such an intervention, then?” He glanced between the two of them with deep suspicion, as if he felt himself the victim of a conspiracy.

“You haven’t been right since you came back from the beach,” Alain said. “Did you think you could hide such a momentous problem from me, Roland? Of all people?”

“Not your finest urge, to be sure,” Cuthbert added. Both the other two shot him a look. Neither of them had much of a taste for joking during serious matters, though Alain, as always, bore it with more patience.

“Do not try to tell me nothing is wrong,” Alain went on. He stepped close to Roland, and put a hand on his shoulder. “Instead, tell me what has happened.”

For a moment, Cuthbert thought perhaps Roland  _ would _ try to insist that nothing was wrong. That moment passed, and Roland put his hand over his eyes, then dragged it down. All at once he seemed to shrink, to grow stooped and unsure.

“I don’t  _ know _ what happened,” he said raggedly. “I suppose I have an idea, but never have I encountered anything like this before. I had almost hoped that perhaps you might know better, but I wished not to share. Things have been delicate of late, as you both know, and I am only just recovered -”

“So you didn’t wish to alarm the new ‘prentices,” Cuthbert finished for him. “Well, I can’t say I think you’ve succeeded in that. Susannah has noticed, at a minimum. She’s a canny one.”

“That she is.” And despite the strange and desperate look to him, there was a note of pride in Roland’s voice as well. “I did not, no. I had hoped perhaps, as well, that time would heal this - this infirmity, but it obviously has not. It has only gotten worse.”

“Tell us what you know of the cause of this affliction,” Alain urged. “All I can discern from touching you is that your mind is pulled between two ideas of reality, and that it’s about a boy. Tell us of him.”

Roland was silent for a long time. His hands came up to his face again, and when he lowered them he looked at his two oldest friends with naked grief. “His name was Jake,” he said, “and I let him die.”

It was, when it came down to it, almost dreadfully simple. On his way across the desert, so Roland said, he met a boy - a boy who hailed from the same world as Eddie and Susannah - in an abandoned waystation. Death had brought the boy through the skin of reality to their own world. He’d been pushed - pushed by Jack Mort, the repellent man whose body Roland had stepped into through the third door on the beach.

He had been pushed to his first death, and in the darkness beneath the mountains, in the halls of the dead where once great machines had thrummed and roared but now lived only slow mutants, he had been dropped to his second. Roland described it pitilessly, without attempt to soften his actions. Given a choice between catching up the man he’d spent most of his long, strange life following, the man who had engineered some of the greatest miseries of his existence, and saving a boy who loved him, Roland had chosen to follow the man in black.

That he at least did not try to defend himself was, perhaps, the only saving grace. Even then, it was paltry grace at best.

“Go then,” Alain said softly, “there are other worlds than these.”

Roland flinched as if struck. “That’s what he said,” he whispered after a moment. “How -”

“I dreamt it. While we made our way through the mountains. I was the boy and I fell into the dark. I knew it was a portent and I was sure it meant death, but I thought - but no, of course, it was the boy’s death I felt.”

“Alain -”

“Wait a moment,” interrupted Cuthbert. “Do you mean to tell me, Al, that you had a dream you thought portended your own death, and you didn’t tell me of it?”

Alain’s dark silhouette shifted as he shrugged. “Truth be told, I mostly forgot about it once I awoke in the morning. Death has been with us for a long time, Bert. I didn’t think it terribly important either way.”

“Well, of course it’s important -”

Alain held up a hand. “Hush. We can argue about it later, if you wish. It’s not what we need to discuss right now.”

And as much as Cuthbert hated to admit it, he was right on that account. Whatever was happening to Roland was of far more immediate importance than a long-ago dream Alain hadn’t shared.

“So this Jack Mort fellow killed him once, and then you killed him again,” said Cuthbert, noting the way Roland once more flinched at his casual summation of the chain of events, “and then what?”

“And then I saved him,” Roland said. “When I went through the door into Jack Mort, he was about to push Jake. I stopped him from doing so, and then I led him to his death, so he couldn’t do it again. And so now -”

“Oh,” Alain breathed, “oh,  _ Roland _ .” He may not have ever been the quickest of them, but in certain subjects he was quite clever, and he grasped it at once. “So you prevented him from dying the death that brought him into our world in the first place. By saving him, you made it so you never met him in the desert and never let him fall beneath the mountain. But you  _ did _ meet him in the desert and all that followed from that  _ did _ happen, and so now you’re living in two realities at once - and so is the boy. What a torment it must be!”

“A torment,” Roland said, “is exactly what it is.”

“So we’ve got to get reality back on its proper track then, correct?” Cuthbert asked. “How are we meant to do that, though? Surely we aren’t meant to kill the boy all over again.”

“ _ No _ ,” Roland snapped, at the same time as Alain said more gently, “No.”

“No,” said Alain again, musingly, “I don’t think we need to  _ kill _ him. Right now the loop is disrupted because he is meant to be in our world, but remains in his own. I think what we need to do is bring him through.”

“Seems perhaps we left the beach of magic doors a bit early, then. Or can you carve us up a hole between dimensions to pull him through?” 

“Such is quite beyond me, Bert, as I think you know, though your estimation of my abilities is very flattering.” Dry though his tone was, there was excitement in it as well. Such a challenge was no doubt the sort of problem Alain enjoyed sinking his teeth into. So little that confronted them was so squarely within his sphere of knowledge and influence. “No, I can only suppose that we must search for something like the doors, some place where the fabric of the world is thin enough that perhaps we can poke a hole.”

“And what shall we do for poor Roland’s tormented brain in the meantime?” Try as he did to keep his tone light, Cuthbert was concerned. Simply knowing that a problem must be solved did not mean a solution would manifest in a timely manner. Had they not spent most of their lives in search of the Tower, for instance, with precious little to show for it save a trail of dead friends?

“I am not sure. It is truly a terrible burden on a mind to try and hold two contradicting truths at the same time.” Alain did not say, although Cuthbert was sure he was as aware of it as Cuthbert was himself, that Roland was especially ill-suited to such a thing, having been gifted with a stunning lack of imagination. “Knowing what the problem is, I can try to do what I can to ease it… but I believe we must simply work to bring the boy over as soon as can be done.”

And plan, perhaps, for what they would do if it couldn’t be done, and the strain drove Roland mad. Alain did not say it, but Cuthbert thought it, and he couldn’t imagine that Alain didn’t consider it a possibility. Even more probable, perhaps, than finding some hole in reality through which they could reach and pluck a specific boy from a specific world.


	16. Chapter 16

The splendor of the place could easily pull Roland out of his own head. Their camp was nothing special, simply a semi-circular clearing amongst the trees near enough a creek to fetch water and wash off. A mile further on, though, he had found this place and made it his classroom, and it was beautiful.

To one side loomed the trees of the forest. To the other, the hill they had climbed fell abruptly off in a series of crumbling steps down to the heavily wooded valley below. Each day they had ascended steadily higher, though never had the grade been steep enough to feel difficult, so that now when he looked out and over the side he found himself looking down on the birds which flew above those distant treetops. 

The creek which flowed sedately past their camp bubbled out of the ground here and went pouring over the edge of the cliff. It became mist and rainbows, then, sparkling against the exposed grey rock.

He had admired the place when he found it. There was enough romance in his soul to love such beauty. His focus, however, was on the woman.

It was not Susannah’s first time with live ammunition, but it was her first time on the draw from the holster they had rigged for her. Once it had hung at Roland’s right hip, but he and Alain had altered it to fit across her chest in a modified docker’s clutch.

“Tell me how the holster sits,” he bade her. “Is it comfortable?” To be certain of their final alterations was one purpose of the day’s lessons, though not the most urgent. “If so, tell me now. We aren’t here to waste ammunition.” Such a wealth of it he had, so much he almost couldn’t credit it - but stretched between five gunslingers, it would not prove to be such a treasure trove as it seemed. And though Eddie and Susannah came from a world of ease and plenty, they had to learn that this was a world where the gods punished wastrels.

“How’re you gonna know if I shoot bad because of the holster and not just because my aim’s off?” she asked, a gleam in her eyes. “Maybe I’m just having an off day.”

“You’re a fast draw and a good shot,” said Roland patiently, entirely unperturbed by this. He’d been a ‘prentice once himself, full of piss and vinegar and sure he knew best. He remembered, too, the way Cuthbert had often spoken the challenges Roland himself simply thought. “I know what it looks like to fumble a gun on the draw, and I can discern when that’s due to poor technique and when it’s due to poor equipment. And I know the difference between fumbling and aiming badly. So, tell me, is it comfortable?”

Susannah shifted around, wiggling in her chair and rolling her shoulders. The holster moved easily with her. She drew the gun slowly, eased it back into its holster, and then drew it again quickly. She put it back and twisted herself around, repeating the exercise from several angles. At all of them, Roland was pleased to see, the butt of the gun was well within reach of her hand, and the gun did not catch but came smoothly from the holster.

“I think it’s about as comfortable as it’s ever gonna be,” she reported, once she was done testing it. Though she’d challenged him, it pleased him to see that she took it seriously.

“Then say your lesson, Susannah Holmes, daughter of Dan, and say it true.”

Susannah took a deep breath, and began to recite the ancient catechism. “I do not aim with my hand. She who aims with her hand has forgotten the face of her father. I aim with my eye.” At first she spoke self-consciously, stiffly. Gradually the words began to flow more smoothly and naturally, as the calmness which the catechism was designed to produce fell over her. “I do not shoot with my hand. She who shoots with her hand has forgotten the face of her father. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun - Roland,” she broke off, eyeing him once more with that mixture of defiance and worry, knowing full well she was treading on his patience but not willing to simply hold her tongue and defer, “I’m not  _ killing _ anything. I’m just shooting some little rocks.”

And that, right there, was what they were truly there for. In most respects, Susannah had drawn ahead of Eddie. He wasn’t a bad student, but she was the more skilled, except in this one area. Eddie had no problem at all with the idea of killing. 

Susannah, Roland knew, had killed before. He had listened closely to Cuthbert’s recounting of their encounter with the boar-monster in these very same woods. He had listened closely, as well, to Cuthbert’s recounting of how he and Susannah had quarreled the night before. She had been wracked with guilt and uncertainty over killing and anger at discovering she was being tested. She’d insisted that she was a peaceful sort of person, a  _ civilized _ sort of person.

Perhaps that had once been true. Certainly she was a cultured and educated woman. If he were pressed, Roland would say she was likely more intelligent than he himself, and more gentle for a certainty. There was a time and place for gentleness and restraint,  but there was no place at all in this world - in any gunslinger in any world - for an outright refusal to kill. She had to make that action part of herself, as instant a reaction in a situation which required it as any other.

She had acted - and killed - to defend herself and Cuthbert. The battle spirit had come over her, that crystal-clear coldness that slowed down the whole world and left one able to act and react with impeccable speed and timing. What Roland needed to know was that she could not only use it when her life was in danger, but that she could summon it when she needed it. 

And so he put his hand on her shoulder and he said, “No. They’re not just rocks.”

“Oh?” She cocked her head towards him, her eyes bright and shiny. Still playful, for now, still convinced there was a joke here which she was in on. “They ain’t?”

“No. They  _ ain’t. _ Do you remember the men of Oxford Town, Susannah?” Immediately, the mischief died from her eyes, replaced by a look of sullen bewilderment. Undeterred, Roland pointed at the rocks set up on the boulder beside the stream which would serve as her targets. “The men who beat your friends? Who jailed you? Who locked you in a cell and laughed and jeered at you like a caged animal? Who called you vile names?” He spoke softly into her ear. With every word, he felt the tension winding tighter in her. “Do you remember them, Susannah?”

“Yes,” she ground out, her voice as flat and grey as a rock itself. “I remember.”

“Remember the hoses they turned on you? The man with the gold teeth, twinkling in the light as he laughed when you pissed yourself? Do you remember?”

“Why d’you want me to be thinking about all that trash, Roland?” Her eyes met his, bright and sharp, sunlight glinting off the edge of a knife. “What’re you bringing that back into my mind for? That wasn’t me. Not really.”

He squeezed her shoulder tightly. That look in her eyes, that was a killing look. It reminded him very much of the way Alain got when his anger was finally roused. “I want you to remember, Susannah. Because it  _ was  _ you, even if you don’t wish to admit it. Not you as you are now, no, but you as you were. We all carry the hurts of ourselves as we once were.” It was very important to him that she understand that. Time moved on and swept all men and women forwards with it, and being remade could not erase the pain of the past. All too well did he know that. “I want you to remember that hurt, Susannah. Remember it well. And I want you to look and see that those aren’t rocks, there. On yonder boulder sit those men. Do you see them, Susannah?”

“I see them,” she said, her voice now quiet and tight. All traces of playfulness were gone from her. Her chest rose and fell in quick jerks with her breathing. 

“Say me your lesson.”

She said him her lesson. The words fell from her lips like stones, like chunks of ice, all cold and hard and bitten off. The battle mind was on her. Roland spoke no more, for his part was done, and the rest was up to her. Though he was sure - he was almost entirely sure - that she would shoot well, still he felt a great anxiety that she would not.

Had old Cort ever felt that way, beneath his gruff exterior? Had the cuffs and tongue-lashings he handed out to boys who failed him been borne as much of the sting of disappointment as from a desire to correct? Roland supposed so.

She said her lesson well and she shot well. The coldness of the battle mind dropped over her and then receded. Roland saw this, and a great pride welled up, hot and fierce inside his chest. She was, indeed, a gunslinger.

\---

“Why, Eddie -” a shadow fell over him, accompanied by Cuthbert’s pleasant voice - “is that a sling you’re carving?”

Eddie tensed, fighting the reflexive urge to shove the half-carved wood and knife behind his back. “Yeah, that’s what I’m goin’ for.” He tried to sound casual, though the tension crept into his tone.

If he wanted to be generous, which he usually didn’t, he would admit that it wasn’t exactly Cuthbert’s fault. The thing was that once upon a time, back in the life in the world that increasingly felt like some strange fever dream compared to the immediateness of the bizarre place he’d found himself in, Edward Cantor Dean had fallen madly in love with wood-carving. There hadn’t been any classes or special equipment, not for the likes of him, but he’d been able to take the paring knife from the kitchen drawer and scrounge up a knot of wood from here or there and sit his ass outside on the hot concrete in the summer - still cooler, still easier than the inside of their sweltering, paper-dusty apartment, crowded as it was with their sister’s ghost - and carve.

The game had been to see what was hidden in the wood and bring as much out as possible. Eddie hadn’t ever been able to get all of it, but in a few occasions he’d been able to get most of it. The more he tried the better he got at it, and it was so intensely pleasurable to just sit and peel long, curving strips of wood off, that even the failures were fun. 

He’d loved everything about it and, as with anything he liked and was good at, it’d gotten on Henry’s nerves. And anything that got on Henry’s nerves was  _ verboten _ in the Dean household. Henry already bore the whole weight of Eddie’s life and safety, so it was only fair - not right, but fair - that Eddie just  _ cut it the fuck out _ if he got it into his head to do something that freaked Henry out. Of course, Henry hadn’t ever come out and said anything so plain as,  _ Hey, bro, you’re getting pretty good at that, and it makes me nervous when you’re good at shit because, hey, I’m not really good at anything, so how about you just cut it the fuck out? _

No, what Henry would do was just kind of rag on him. Brotherly ragging, of course. Normal teasing. Nothing too bad, nothing too obvious - but, like the snowball specials he liked to pack and throw during winter, there was a sharp inner core which hit Eddie hard enough to make his meaning clear.

No one here really cared. Susannah had asked about his whittling, mentioned her father used to do it, and not asked since. Roland had looked upon Eddie’s taking-up of the hobby with something like approval. Neither Alain nor Cuthbert had said much, and that was because they were almost always together and Eddie had, without really realizing it, without admitting it to himself in his up-top mind, been hiding it from Cuthbert.

Because Cuthbert - Cuthbert with his easy smiles and his easy laugh and his long, foxy, unlined face, Cuthbert who looked so young and almost sweet, who seemed so soft beside Roland’s unsmiling hardness, who seemed so approachable compared to Alain’s reserved silence - had a way of joking that felt like getting whopped in the back of the head by one of Henry’s snowball specials. He’d be all smiles and laughs, bantering back and forth, whiffing softballs, and then all of a sudden one would hit and there’d be a rock in the middle.

There wasn’t any warning. With Henry, there’d been signs. Eddie had studied those his whole life, and he’d come early to an exquisite understanding of Henry’s personal weather. With Cuthbert, he had no idea. The guy never seemed  _ mad _ , he never seemed like he  _ felt _ mean, but he’d open his pretty mouth and whip you bloody with his tongue and then smile that  _ ain’t we all such good friends  _ smile.

So when he stopped and asked about the carving, it was Henry’s voice that Eddie heard.  _ Whatcha carvin’?  _ Henry jeered from inside of Eddie’s head.  _ Whatcha makin’, a little pisspot for your teeny-weeny baby peeny? Aw, ain’t dat cute? _

“Here, have mine as a pattern to work from,” Cuthbert said. He drew his sling from his belt and handed it easily over. He was gentle right then, no rocks, no barbs. 

Eddie took the sling. “Thanks, man.” It would help. He hadn’t been able to admit that or ask, so he’d just been eyeballing it when he could and going from memory. Already, holding Cuthbert’s expertly carved and polished sling, he saw the shape of his own that much more clearly. “You guys have fun out there.”

Cuthbert grinned at him, that wide and dazzling smile which made it so hard to remember the hidden rocks, the bruises, the sting. “Oh, we will at that.

The two of them left, and within short order, Eddie had fallen so deep into the hypnotic trance which the act of creation brought that he was barely aware of the world around him.

\---

As they walked, Alain loosened his grip on his own mental awareness just a touch. Of late he’d kept his mind on a tight leash, for expanding too far outside himself inevitably meant brushing up against Roland’s mind, and day by day the fracture within him grew worse. 

He had to wonder whether or not Roland’s own nature were a boon to him in this scenario. Perhaps a more flexible mind might have borne the strain more easily. Perhaps someone quick and clever like Cuthbert might have been able to reconcile himself to the idea of two simultaneous realities existing side by side. At the same time, though, perhaps it was Roland’s very lack of imagination, his utterly practical straightforwardness, that allowed him to bear up under a state of mind that Alain, for all his years of training, could hardly even touch without falling all apart. Perhaps he simply accepted that the situation  _ was _ , that clearly the boy was both alive and dead, and therefore was being torn apart more slowly than otherwise.

Either way, though, Alain feared that they would not find a way to bring the boy into their world in time. It seemed unthinkable to him that after so long, Roland’s quest would end in such a way, and yet he did not see a way out of it. No prophecy had come to him to suggest otherwise. He was simply frightened for his friend.

Right then, though, he did not let himself think of it. All of those fears and worries - all of the concerns he had about everything, all of the pain of sleeping rough and the grief at leaving what had become a sort of home to him and the certainty that most of them would be dead before their quest was done - he put into a part of his mind and then cordoned that part off. He was not avoidant by nature, but a lifetime of feeling other people’s feelings had made him an expert in shunting distressing thoughts to the side.

Instead, he let himself enjoy the moment. They were far enough away from Roland that he could open his mind a bit. Walking beside him, Cuthbert thrummed with sweet anticipation. They hadn’t had more than a handful of snatched minutes alone with each other since Bert brought Roland and the two new gunslingers up the beach, and the gods alone knew when they might have another such chance. 

Cuthbert was thinking about touching him. Cuthbert was thinking that once Eddie finished carving his sling, he’d take the man out and give him a few more direct lessons. Cuthbert was thinking of how he might prepare dinner. Cuthbert noticed the rusty squawking of distant crows and got midway through a counting rhyme from their childhood before the sight of a skull, half-buried in the soft leaf litter of the forest floor and sprouting a leggy shrub, distracted him.

Further out - the trees all hummed with slow and ancient life. Alain loved to touch old trees. They weren’t anything near human, but some of the larger ones felt like sleeping folk to him. Faster, hotter, smaller lives scurried across the forest floor and burrowed beneath it and climbed in the trees. Distantly, he felt some sort of huge and ancient awareness. Closer by, he felt Eddie, absorbed in the repetitive and transcendent joy of creation. Susannah, full of anger and fierce pride all at once. Roland - he shied away as soon as his mind touched Roland’s, like a child who has put his hand on a hot cookpot, but it wasn’t so bad. At the moment, Roland was focused on Susannah and single-minded in his focus.

Back to Cuthbert. He slid into Cuthbert’s mind like a man climbing into bed after a long day. It was familiar, comfortable, warm. It fit him well. He let himself expand to fill up the very edges of Cuthbert’s skin. He could have done it easily without Cuthbert being aware, but he let himself be felt, for he knew that Cuthbert enjoyed such intimacy as much as he did. The warm flush of Cuthbert’s pleasure pulled him further from his own stiff and aching body, and he went quite willingly.

They came to a stop in a woody, shaded little area that looked like every other bit of forest. Alain picked Cuthbert up, closing his eyes against the dizzying rush of vertigo and pulling to the forefront, instead, the giddy joy Bert always felt at being handled so. He leaned Bert against a tree, rough bark against his back, and kissed him, and lost his sense of himself somewhere in the space where their mouths met.

Bert pulled his head back, hands buried in his hair. Enough of his mind came back to his body that he could open his eyes and look up into Bert’s lovely, narrow face. Somewhere out in the forest, something crashed heavily to earth, and the birds called, but the two of them paid little mind to anything outside their own bodies.

“I want to be in you,” he murmured. With his touch he sent the meaning that mere words could not convey, that what he wanted was to be outside of his own self.

“Yes,” Bert said, and  _ yes _ and  _ yes _ as Alain flowed between the two of them and into him, and  _ yes _ as Alain pulled his consciousness from its usual place and passed it along to his own body, until it was with Alain’s own tongue and teeth and throat that he said it with, Alain’s own voice.

Though Bert always gave it willingly, Alain tried not to ask this of him often. The sudden sense of lightness he felt at exiting his own body - that old, clumsy thing, that stiff and battered flesh - could only be mirrored by a corresponding heaviness. For Alain, it was a freedom from the pain he lived with daily, but for Bert, it had to be a burden.

He wrapped Bert’s long, nimble legs around his own body’s thick waist and canted Bert’s skinny hips up. Now he was the one held, pinned between the tree and the solid body before him, unable to move save at that body’s discretion. What a thrill it was! There was no mystery to why Bert liked it so much. Being, for a moment, whole and free of his own flesh was highly attractive to Alain, but it wasn’t the only reason he liked to do this - he liked to be taken as well.

“Have me like this,” he begged in Bert’s own sweet voice. When they had set out from camp, he’d known this was on Bert’s mind, and he’d wanted it, but not with the aching fervor he did right then. Bert’s body wanted it too, longed for it in a way that both was and was not like the way his own body did.

Joined in mind already, they were soon joined in body. Alain could not keep himself separate then. His awareness bled back through to his own body, but it was a dual awareness, and he gave to Bert a sense of being inside of him while being inside of him while being inside of him - 

Afterwards, they lay together on the forest floor, and Alain eased reluctantly back into his own body. It was heavier and it hurt. The pain across his shoulders from holding Bert’s body up against the tree was pleasant enough, but the pain in his hip and knee was an ugly, hot, itching sort. He always pictured it as if someone had sewn live coals into him.

Bert ran his fingertips down Alain’s chest and stomach, almost tickling. “I didn’t know your leg had gotten that bad, Al.”

Laying down so, he could not shrug. He made a vague noise instead. 

Bert lifted himself up on his elbow, arm laid across Alain’s chest, and looked seriously down into his face. “Don’t you  _ mm  _ me about it. You can’t very well invite me to possess you and then act as if I don’t know exactly what sort of a state you’re in.”

“It’s just from sleeping rough,” Alain said, trying to pacify. “I’ll get used to it, I’m sure.” Attempting humor, he added, “You’ve given me too soft a life these past few years, that’s all.”

Cuthbert did not look pacified. He continued to frown down into Alain’s face for a moment, then laid back down, head nestled in the crook of his shoulder. “Have you said aught to Roland about it?”

“And what would I say to Roland?” Peevish sharpness crept into Alain’s tone. He wasn’t angry, really, certainly not with Bert. But he did hurt something fierce, moreso after their little diversion. It was always easy to forget, when they switched places like that, that in the end he’d have to go back into his own body and stay there. He asked Bert to do things that he would never have done on his own, if he had to feel it the whole way. 

“Why, I don’t know, Al. That we need to slow down, maybe, or -” Cuthbert cut himself off with a frustrated noise. “Something.”

“Roland came to me before we left.” Alain put his hand to Bert’s head and stroked his sleek hair, scritching a bit with his nails at Bert’s scalp. Like coaxing an unhappy cat to purr, he felt the tingling pleasure of it spread slowly through Bert’s tense body, relaxing him. “He asked me much the same thing. If I was capable.”

“I know you’re  _ capable _ ,” protested Cuthbert. “I simply don’t think we need to be putting you through unnecessary pain, is all.”

Alain was quiet for a long time. He stroked Cuthbert’s hair and closed his eyes, letting the forest seep into him. Down on the ground they were surrounded by the earthy smell of dirt and old pine needles and decaying leaves. Somewhere far away the crows were calling, more indignant than before. He hurt, and badly, but at the same time, there was much of good to feel in the world. 

His mind was whole, at least. He could enjoy this post-coital drowsiness. He could glory in the perfect, warm wonder of a day in a forest which had not seen men in a hundred generations. He could stride beneath the canopy and send the dead trees crashing to the ground with a single shove of his mighty paws, and it would quiet the itching, burrowing agony in his skull, and thus relieved he could continue back on his path to find the men in his forest and root them out once and for all, destroy them before his death agonies overtook him - 

Gasping, he pulled back. Whatever mind he had fallen into was as vast as it was ancient, as alien as it was terrible - and very close. He sat up, rolling Cuthbert unceremoniously off.

“We have to go. Get dressed. Help me up. Gods be damned, we have to -”

Well accustomed to such flashes of insight, Cuthbert did as he bid. He stood and gave Alain a hand up, then dressed himself as swiftly as he’d been undressed. He was clothed while Alain still struggled with his own pants and boots, and so he lent a quick and practiced hand.

“What is it?” he asked urgently, tying up Alain’s boots while Alain dragged his shirt over his head and made sure his gunbelts were properly secured. 

“I know not. Something huge. Something old. It’s dying, I think, and it’s angry, and it knows we’re here.” Swearing, he snatched at his staff where it rested against a tree - the self-same tree they’d made love against, what felt now like days ago. How quickly things could change! And how foolish it had been to let his guard down for even a moment in these strange and savage lands. “It’s heading towards the camp, I think.”

They set off as quickly as they could. At such a time, Cuthbert knew better than to lag behind and match Alain’s pace, and so he vanished up ahead, his long legs eating up the distance. Even he, Alain knew, would not be able to arrive in time. The thing bellowing its way through the forest, near enough now for them to hear with their ears, was larger and faster and closer than any of them had guessed. It would be on Eddie before the two of them could get there and be of any use. 

He could only pray that the last few months of training had been enough for Eddie to hold his own and either defeat the creature or stay alive until help arrived.

\---

Susannah’s heartbeat thundered in her ears. It was in her throat, rattling her teeth with each pump. Her lungs had frozen, her chest all still and tight. The monster bear lay dying on the ground, puddles of squirming parasites fleeing the drying swamp of its body, but all she saw over and over again was the thing reaching up to break the tree in its monstrous paws - and doing it, this time. Her shot missing. Her, choking in the crucial moment, watching as the bear shook Eddie down and ate him in one yawning gulp.

Even with Eddie’s arms around her and his body pressed up against hers, warm and vital and very alive, she kept seeing that. She planted frantic kisses all over his face, not even caring to try and hit his mouth, and clutched at every bit of him she could reach. The more she touched him and felt his skin and hair under her fingers, the easier it was to believe he was alive.

“Holy shit,” he whispered between the two of them. “Holy shit, I thought that thing was gonna wear my guts for garters. What a shot!”

“I hope I never have to do something like that again,” she said fervently… but she couldn’t quite believe it. Part of her had liked it very much. The same part of her which now helped hunt for their supper without hardly a qualm, the same part that still sometimes remembered killing that ungodly boar monster with a thrill - not a hot thrill, though. Not excitement, no. It was a cold voice, a cold part, a cold thrill, like crunching an ice cube between her teeth.

Sure as anything, they were making a killer out of her. Susannah couldn’t imagine that this had somehow been a staged test, but it had been awfully convenient, hadn’t it?

Eddie turned, shifting her so that she was hitched up against his hip. “Hey, Roland, what was this thing?”

“He called it a Guardian, I think,” Susannah said. The whole sequence of events was beginning to blur in her memory already. All the frantic panic leached away, leaving only the images - and the coldness. 

Now that she was sure Eddie was alright, now that the adrenaline had started to fade, she began once more to take notice of their surroundings. Roland strode across the clearing and grabbed his knife from where it was stuck into the tree that had saved Eddie’s life. Cuthbert came from the other side, opposite the way Susannah and Roland had come.

“My god,” he said, “Roland, it’s -”

“Yes,” said Roland. He knelt beside the thing’s great head and reached out to touch it. He flicked the remnant of the little metal pole sticking up from the center of its skull, then laid his palm against the curve of its head, almost tenderly. “One of the Guardians.” He looked up from the bear and asked, a frown in his voice, “Where is Alain? He ought to see this.”

“Oh, he’ll be along any moment. A shame we missed the party! That was good shooting, Susannah.” He flashed her a quick, proud grin. 

Susannah was not inclined to return it. He’d just come up, obviously rumpled, his hair in disarray and his shirt untied and half-tucked, billowing around his skinny body. Maybe it was unfair, but the thought that the two of them had  _ left Eddie _ sent a pulse of red rage through her. No, she knew it was unfair. She and Roland had left just the same, after all.

_ But you left knowing he was with the other two,  _ said a sly little voice inside her mind, the part of her that didn’t care about fair or unfair, the part that didn’t care about anything other than how close this man she loved had come to dying before her very eyes.  _ You left thinkin’ he was safe, and they were off playing grab-ass in the woods. _

“Next time,” Eddie called back to Cuthbert, not noticeably put out by having been abandoned, “you can get chased up the tree by the fuck-off huge bear, alright? I don’t wanna hog the spotlight.”

“Oh, I’ve had my turn already. But thank you, ‘tis quite considerate.” Cuthbert went to crouch beside Roland, eyeing the monster with open awe. Susannah remembered a day weeks past in the outskirts of these very woods, the sight of Cuthbert’s bony back marred by huge gouges of scar tissue. That had been a normal bear. A young one, from Cuthbert’s telling, not a monster like this. If one of those paws had hit Eddie…

“Where were you?” she asked. “We just barely got here in time. Where the hell were you two?”

Cuthbert glanced at her, something in his eye - not guilt, exactly, but some flicker of something similar - and then Alain came up from the same direction Cuthbert had, hauling as much ass as he ever could, breathing hard. The faster he went, the more noticeable his limp was; when he came through the trees into the clearing it was in such an uneven stagger that Susannah almost worried he was going to tip himself right over.

He came right over to the other two and stood before them, looking between the monster and Eddie and Susannah. “I am glad to find you well,” he said. “We came as quickly as we could, once we knew something was amiss.” There were leaves in his curly hair and a flush across his pale face.

“Susannah had it well in hand,” Roland said. “She took the beast down with a single shot. Come all of you, now, and look here. I’ll show you a lost wonder of the latter days.”

Eddie put Susannah down, and she swung her way over to observe. Roland wiggled the tip of the knife into the bear’s eye socket, then, with a deft and practiced flick of his wrist, popped the eye right out. For a moment he balanced it on the edge of the blade, and then he threw it carelessly aside.

Inside the bear’s eye socket was flesh, riddled with worm tunnels, and blood and bone - and in the back, a dying red light. Fluid bled from it, both organic and clearly non. Mixed with the blood was something clear which smelled potently of bananas.

“What  _ is _ it?” Susannah asked, her fearful anger forgotten in the rush of curiosity. Obviously it was no natural thing. 

“It’s a Guardian,” Roland said again. “One of the Twelve.”

“You never believed in them,” said Cuthbert. He sat on the ground beside the thing, touching the length of its great flank, and then shifted to comb through the tangles of fur on one of its great thighs. “We argued about it, remember? You always told me my head was stuffed with clouds. I ought to have wagered money on it. Eddie, Susannah, come, look here.” He had uncovered a metal plate stuck to the bear’s leg, etched with faded but still readable words.

Susannah edged her way over, craning her head to read it. NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD., it said. There was a serial number, make and model information, and, finally, a name: Shardik.

“Guardian of what?” she asked.

“The Beams,” Cuthbert answered, his tone hushed and reverent. “The Beams which hold up the Tower, my lady.” 

He might have gone on, only there was a mingled exclamation from behind them. They both looked over just in time to see Roland, ashen, swoon bonelessly onto the ground. Eddie stood beside him, frozen and helpless, while Alain lowered himself ponderously to the ground and cradled Roland’s head in his lap.

“There  _ is _ a boy,” he whispered fiercely, staring up sightlessly into Alain’s face with bloodshot eyes. Then, on the very next breath, “There was  _ never _ a boy.”

Alain cupped Roland’s face in his hands. He lowered his own head, staring into Roland’s eyes, and as Susannah watched, he changed. Not visibly, exactly, but some sense of vitality - of his body being inhabited by a working mind - left him. The unsettling thought went through her mind that he was empty, now, just a well-carved department store mannequin, that anything might come along and fill him up.

After some minutes, Alain looked up. Though he had, as far as Susannah could tell, done nothing but sit there touching Roland’s face, he looked tired. No, more than tired. He looked exhausted. Deep, bruised hollows surrounded his eyes, and his skin had taken on a dull, colorless cast, bloodless and wan. He looked old.

“I’ll have to carry him. I can keep his mind together, but it’s hard. He’s gotten very bad.” This he said to the three of them in general, but it meant nothing to Susannah, and from a quick glance at Eddie’s face, nothing to him either.

Well, not nothing, maybe - they’d both known something was wrong with Roland. He kept to himself so much, though. Clearly, Alain and Cuthbert had been taken into his confidence about it where Eddie and Susannah had not. That bothered Susannah, although she was too caught up in the immediate concerns to dwell much on it just then.

Neither she nor Eddie argued about moving. Susannah imagined trying to set up camp next to the silent hulk of the bear’s corpse, ticking like a cooling car engine now, and shivered. No, none of them wanted to spend the night in this place.

Eddie and Cuthbert helped Alain get back to his feet, and then Cuthbert bent and hauled Roland up, flopping lifelessly in his arms like a doll, and draped him over Alain’s broad shoulder. It was unpleasantly reminiscent of the very first time Susannah had ever laid eyes on Alain, when Roland had been so terribly sick, and he’d carried the man up the hill to the cave. Then, at least, they’d known what the problem was. Somehow, she didn’t think a round of antibiotics was going to cure this one.

Eddie picked her up, and they began walking to the shooting gallery.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alain explores the scariest place yet: the inside of Roland's head. Roland admits to some things and explains some other things. Susannah comes to a realization about her traveling companions.

Alain propped Roland’s limp body against the boulder in the clearing. Himself he settled atop it, legs bracketing Roland. He gripped onto Roland’s shoulder with one hand, cupped Roland’s face with the other - unpleasantly lax, like a dummy left out in the sun, something made of wax perhaps, which was on the verge of melting - and reached into his mind.

\- he is on the bottom floor of a vast dark tower looking up and up as far as his eyes can go tracking the progress of the huge spiral staircase which climbs endlessly up the inside of the walls and when he steps foot on it to walk upwards and see what he may see he walks and walks and sees nothing just the same worn stone stairs just the same empty iron fixtures which might once have held torches but now hold only darkness just the same windows which he knows just by looking at were once filled with the most breathtakingly gorgeous stained glass mosaics but are now empty and boarded over broken teeth in an ancient mouth blacked eyes in a sagging face empty blind gone there is no beauty here any longer there is nothing but the grim slog of purpose

\- he comes to a door he opens the door he is on the bottom floor of the tower again

\- he climbs the stairs he finds a door he opens the door he is on the bottom floor of the tower again

\- he climbs the stairs and finds a door and opens the door and steps through and he is   


\- not going to put up with this. he closes his eyes. he imagines a light. he is the light. he opens his eyes and is surrounded by a golden glow and in the light of that glow he sees the lush and beautiful carpets on the stone floor.   


when he begins to walk up the stairs, they are dull and worn and unadorned before and behind him, but where the light of his shining falls they are adorned with a runner in the royal blue of long-lost Gilead, and there are torches burning smokily at regular intervals along the staircase, and when he comes to a window he can see in his own light a small circle of the glory that once was, the gorgeously colored glass picture made of a hundred thousand tiny shapes. he comes to a door. he opens the door. inside the door is a room and inside the room are two chairs and in each of the chairs sits roland.   


“there is a boy,” says roland.

“there was never a boy,” says roland.

they lunge from their chairs at each other. they fall to the ground, hands locked around each other’s throats, screaming, eyes bulging, faces purple with rage, each trying to assert his own reality.

alain wades into the fray and reaches down. he grabs at the two of them, not much caring where his hands actually land, and lifts them away from each other. one of them he has by the back of the shirt, the other by the upper arm. the glow of his shining fills the room and burns back the shadows which sulk in the corners and turns the cobwebs spun by scuttling monstrous spiders in the dark into mist. the room is transformed from a grim and loveless dungeon into an opulently appointed sitting room, the sort of room which roland might have expected to sit in of a night when he became dinh of gilead, before lost gilead fell and crumbled into dust. the chairs become thrones. there is a window, and light, and sweet air.

this may be roland’s mind, but he has little dominion over this interior space. he leaves it to its own devices, peeking in only when he needs guidance, and so it is that alain is more powerful here, able to work his will on this place.

he knows he is not strong enough to fully heal the split within roland’s mind, but he believes that he can reconcile these two disparate halves long enough for roland to find some peace.

“there was a boy,” he says sternly. “and then by your actions the door through which he came into our world was closed, and now there was never a boy, although you know that there was. the two of you can’t be in here together.”

he drops roland and leaves, still carrying roland by the scruff of his neck, very much like a naughty puppy. it troubles him that this divide has so weakened roland’s mind that even his mental projection of himself has barely more substance than a shade - but it makes his job easier as well.

he climbs the staircase and finds another room, several floors up. into this room he unceremoniously shoves roland. “stay here as long as you can. argue with the empty air if you wish. you’re tearing yourself apart, you know.”

it won’t last. soon enough one or the other of roland will open the door and climb the stairs and find himself and begin arguing again, for neither of them can live in peace while the other is there. they must itch at each other terribly, like foreign bodies lodged in a wound. this measure will, perhaps, buy them some time to solve the problem of the boy who both was and was not.

He let go of Roland’s face and shoulder and drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Exhaustion pressed heavily on him, like a blanket made of lead. When he opened his eyes and looked about, he saw that night had begun to fall, and the other three had already kindled a fire nearby.

Dizziness washed over him when he made to stand. He staggered, and might have fallen had not Cuthbert been there to catch him by the elbow and lead him over to the fire. There he sat, basking in the heat, his head in his hands. A slow, sick ache began to pulse between his temples, growing gradually in intensity until it seemed it might shake his teeth loose of his gums.

Cuthbert pressed a bottle into his hand. He fumbled at the cork and opened it, then tipped it onto his tongue without even looking. The syrupy, faintly bitter taste told him what it was. Bless Cuthbert, who knew without being asked that he needed relief, and had brought him one of his less potent energizing tonics. He swallowed down a third of the bottle and handed it back, then waited for it to take effect.

One of the other three said something. Alain did not hear the words as speech, but felt them batter against his ears and worm into his raw brain, and flinched. Someone else spoke, quieter. There followed a period of silence.

“Give some of that to Roland as well,” he said thickly when he finally felt that he could speak without vomiting. Wordlessly, Cuthbert rose and did so, then came to sit down beside him, a protective arm around his shoulders.

Alain could not protest. The close-by warmth of Cuthbert’s body soothed him just as much as did the tonic.

“So,” asked Eddie, lightly, though beneath the tone he was very concerned, very alarmed, and more than a little angry - he knew the three gunslingers were keeping a momentous secret between them and he was displeased to be left out, and this supernatural display had further unsettled him - “so, what’s in the magic bottle?”

“It’s just a bit of a tonic to perk the both of them up,” answered Cuthbert. “It’s mostly sweet syrup and a little bit of the extract of the leaves of the coca plant.”

“I’m sorry, you guys are doin’ coke here? And you’re not sharing?” The monster of addiction wrapped its claws around Eddie’s soul and squeezed, hard. Alain knew that feeling better than he liked to admit. He’d felt it grasp him tightly enough when he’d begun to run out of his tonics and draughts during the years in the cave, and he knew that Eddie had been more deeply addicted than ever he had, and was more newly severed from his drug.

“It is not recreational,” Alain told him. “I was in his mind. I cannot join his halves, but I put them apart from each other. It will give us time.”

A silence followed that, and then Susannah spoke up. “Time to what? What’s wrong with him? I think it’s time the two of you came clean with us about what’s going on.”

“No need to press them,” said Roland, very faintly, from where he still sat propped against the boulder. “I will tell you myself.” He came forward, into the circle of the firelight, and settled himself creakily down right near the flames. He had something in his hands, something he’d dug out of his pack as they’d been speaking. What it was exactly Alain could not see, but he could feel the shape of it - feel the coldness that emanated from it, hear the ghost of old laughter - and he knew it was nothing good.

Eddie and Susannah shifted, one to Roland’s left and one to Roland’s right, their shoulders nearly touching his. He glanced from one of them to the other, and a weary smile crossed his face.   


“How very close the two of you sit to me. I shan’t escape this conversation, I suppose.” He dreaded it, but he wanted it to happen, as well. The weight of the secret bowed him over, and he was eager to lessen it.   


Alain tried to pull back from his mind, but it was difficult. It was, in its own way, like making love; even after the act was done and the climax finished, still they two were joined, and even after he slid out there was still the bodily memory of that joining. His mind still recalled being inside of Roland’s, and there was still that connection between them, so that he felt Roland more clearly than even Cuthbert at his side.                           


“No way, man,” Eddie said. “Dish it out.”

“I’m not sure where to begin,” Roland said, but even as he said it he was ordering his thoughts and considering what to say. Ever was that Roland’s way. The poison built inside of him and though he never  _ wanted  _ to spill it out, he was always grateful to be made to. “There is so much of it, you understand, and it’s all so bound up in other things. I’m not sure what to start with.”

“Start with the bear,” Eddie suggested. “The, what did you guys say it was, a guardian?”

“And finish with this,” Susannah said, reaching to touch the thing in Roland’s lap.   


Nodding, Roland held it up, and Alain saw that it was a jawbone, yellowed with age and bare of any scrap of flesh. Whose, he did not think he had to ask. Cold sweat broke out over his body. All this time, all these miles, and Roland had been carrying that man around in his very pocket… and Alain had not, until this very moment, noticed.

“Here is what I was taught,” Roland began, “when I was a child. When everything was new, there were made twelve portals around the edge of the world, which led into and out of it. Some said that the portals were natural things, that they came of the Prim. Our Master Vannay believed so. He spoke often of his beliefs of the concept of natural evolution, that the world by various forces shaped itself and all the creatures within it into what it was. The head cook, though, a man named Hax - ah, Hax.”   


He sighed. A great rush of memories flowed across his mind, one after the other: the heat and smells of the kitchens, a mouthful of hot blueberry pie, the way Hax’s whole body would shake and jiggle with his booming laugh, his huge kind hands, the creak of a rope and the screaming of the gallows birds. Alain had not been there to witness the man’s execution, but Roland and Bert both had, and they both thought of it when his name left Roland’s mouth

“We saw him hanged,” said Roland dreamily, distantly, “Bert and I. I told you so, did I not? Bert was afraid, which I suppose was only natural, for we were not much older than you, but it was at our word that he died, and so we had to watch…”

“No-oo,” said Susannah slowly into the silence which followed. “You’ve never told us about that, Roland. I think you’ve mentioned the name before -”

“You said it a lot while you were sick,” Eddie added. “But you never told us that.”

“We overheard him plotting treason,” Cuthbert said. Even so many years later, the memory brought up a mingled sense of anger and guilt. “We were ten or eleven or so. We often went to him to be fed when Master Cort made us fast as punishment, and one day he made the mistake of discussing his plans while we were still about, all unknowing, and so we went to Roland’s father about it, and he was sentenced to execution.”

“And the two of you watched it?” Susannah asked, sounding horrified. “As little kids?”

“Hey,” Eddie said, “they didn’t have TV back then.”

Bert shrugged, the smooth motion of his bony shoulder jostling Alain’s head where it lay. “As Roland said, it was on our word that he was killed. I have to say, considering how everything turned out, I almost wish we had stayed our tongues. Wouldn’t have made a bit of difference for the Good Man’s war, but I might have been able to eat his meat pies ‘til the fall.”

“He meant to poison the entire town of Taunton,” Roland said severely. But it had not been the idea of treason, in the end, that had moved Roland to tell, had it? It had been the sudden, shocking pain of finding that a man he trusted and loved could do evil.  _ He changed it, and it hurt… Why, that’s almost worthy, Roland. Not moral, but worthy.  _ In his coldness, Roland thought to emulate the father he had never quite been able to please, not knowing that his very desire to please the man meant he had more warmth in him than ever Steven Deschain had.

Bert shrugged again. “They were very good meat pies.” Bert had never been much concerned with morals either. The center of his morality had been Roland. Was still Roland. Roland said to tell, and so Bert had, and Roland told him that he could and would and must witness the execution, and so he had.   


“So these portals,” Eddie said eagerly, “they’re like doors, right? Like the ones you took me and Suze through on the beach? Do you think they open on our world, then?” Eddie often went for entire days without thinking much of home, but then something would remind him and it would crash down on him once more how far away he was, how unable to return he was. Bittersweet longing clogged his chest and throat at the thought that there might exist a way to lay eyes on that world once more.

“I don’t know,” Roland answered. “There are a great many things I don’t know. The world has moved on, Eddie, like a great wave receding, and what you see left is naught more than the ancient hulks of wrecked ships that once sat below the waters. Do you understand?”

A flicker of an image from Eddie: the jaundiced yellow eye of the sun, wallowing off-kilter in a leaden sky. Cuthbert’s voice, saying  _ The world has moved on. _   


“Well, can’t you make a guess?”

“The man don’t guess,” Susannah said. It exasperated her, but at the same time, she respected that Roland did not say anything he wasn’t fully sure of. Whatever she thought of his personality, she couldn’t help but admire his iron convictions.

“Sometimes he does,” Roland said. “When he has no other choice, he does. Although he also asks the expert in the subject, should he have one at his disposal.”

Cuthbert nudged him. Being so named and so jostled, Alain fell back into himself. He raised his head from Bert’s shoulder and peeled his weary eyes open and stared silently into the fire, trying to gather his thoughts. He had dispersed himself quite widely among his ka-mates, and trying to be singly within himself felt rather like squeezing his feet into a pair of stiff, new boots. Time had helped, and the tonic had helped, but he was also still dizzy and tired, the inside of his head echoing unpleasantly with every thought. “Yes and no,” he said finally. “I am sure some of them do. I’m sure many of them don’t. There are other worlds than just our two.”

_ There are other worlds than these _ . That was from Roland. A young voice, high, frightened. A boy’s voice, perhaps. A pale face floating above an endless dark chasm. Alain recalled his dream of falling and shivered. Bert’s arm tightened around his shoulders.

Roland nodded. “That is about what I would have said. These portals are different from the doors on the beach, I think. Those were more like -” He made a seesawing motion with his hand. “They were like the center of a child’s totterboard, I believe. Do’ee have such a thing in your world?”

“A seesaw?” Susannah asked. Play-yard memories: rusty metal squealing, wooden creaking, the wind against her knees as her skirt flew up. She enjoyed the freedom of being a woman, but longed often for the uncomplicated way being young had felt.

Roland lit up. “Yes! Just so. At one end of it, my own ka. At the other, that of the man in black. Walter, or Marten, however you wish to name him. The doors on the beach were, I believe, created of the tension between our two opposing destinies. The twelve portals of the Guardians are...different.”

“What,” asked Susannah, “are you saying they’re…  _ outside _ ka? Above it?”

“There are forces,” said Alain slowly, “far greater. The ka of such creations envelopes ours like a raindrop being swallowed by the ocean.” Having thus contributed, he laid his head back on Bert’s shoulder and closed his eyes again.

In the following quiet, there came a scratching sound. His own eyes closed, Alain saw - ghostly and smeared, as if he were peering through a distant, dirty window - Roland’s own abbreviated right hand holding a stick and sketching in the dirt. It was for the benefit of Eddie and Susannah, for of course all three gunslingers knew the shape of the world already, knew of the Beams which stretched between the portals, and -

“Here is the shape of the world as I was taught it,” said Roland as he sketched. “And at the edge of it, at twelve equal points, a portal. And at each portal, the Great Old Ones set a Guardian. Connecting each set of portals is what we call a Beam, and where the Beams all meet each other, here in the middle -”

“Is that it?” Eddie asked, in a bare whisper. “Is that -”

“Yes. It’s the Dark Tower for which I have searched most of my life.” Roland spoke of it quite casually, although the mention of it struck Eddie and Susannah quite differently. Alain, even, felt a chill. The Dark Tower, that looming thing, that vast stake through the heart of not only their world but of every world which ever was. Through all of their own hearts, as well, for it had snared Roland neat as a hare on a spit, and they four all belonged to him. “Each of the Guardians was given a name… I used to remember them all, for there were a number of children’s rhymes about them, but now… There was the Bat, the Lion, the Elephant…”

“Bird and Bear and Hare and Fish,” Alain mumbled into Cuthbert’s shoulder, sing-song. “Give my love her fondest wish.” From Roland’s mind, that came, still so raw even after all these years.

“The Turtle,” Roland went on, as if perhaps he had not heard. “He was an important one. I remember…  _ See the Turtle of enormous girth! On his shell he holds the earth. His thought is slow but always kind. He holds us all within his mind. He sees the truth but mayn’t aid. On his back all vows are made. He loves the land and loves the sea, and even loves a child like me. _ ” He glanced between Eddie and Susannah, smiling a small, bemused smile. “Hax taught me that while he whipped the frosting for some cake and fed me nips of the sweet off the edge of the spoon. Strange what one remembers…”

“ _ Hear the Lion, roaring loud! With might paws, so brave and proud! His eyes are stars, his mane the sun. Beneath his gaze all wars are won. He loves the fighters, loves the brave, and he protects the weak all night and day. _ ” This from Cuthbert as well, who always had a memory for rhymes and songs and poems. “I quite liked the one about the Fish as well, but I don’t recall all the words.”

“I never thought they were real,” Roland said. “As a child I believed the stories, but as I grew older, I came to believe they were simply… a metaphor, of sorts. A myth.” He uttered a short, hard laugh. “It seems I was very wrong. I think that we must have been looking for such a thing for the whole of this quest, though we knew it not. Now that we’ve found this one, why, all we need do is follow his backtrail to the place he was guarding, and we will find ourselves on the path of the Beam. From there we simply follow it to the Tower.”

He raised his head and looked them all over, one by one, meeting each set of eyes. Susannah and Eddie, come so newly to this quest, he included no less and no more than Alain and Cuthbert, who had been with him since the beginning, since before he even knew there was such a thing as the Dark Tower, back when he was still sure Gilead would stand forever.

“And so we come to the other thing. For I have found my course, finally, but am losing my sanity. Whatever it is you did within my mind, Alain, it has given me great respite, but all the same I feel my sanity crumbling beneath me like a steep embankment washed out by rain. Not even you can keep me from falling, I don’t think. And this is my punishment for letting a boy who never existed fall to his death. That is ka.”

“Who is he, Roland?” Susannah asked, almost gently.

“I have told Alain and Cuthbert of him. And Eddie - do you know?”

Eddie frowned. He bit his lip, and thought. Finally, he shook his head. “No, I have no idea.”

“I spoke of him, though,” Roland said, with great and terrible patience. “When I was sick with fever, Eddie, I raved of him. You became frustrated with me for speaking of him so often. Do you not remember?”

Eddie thought further, but it was clear that he had no recollection. “I don’t - I mean, do you? You were there too.” This to Cuthbert, who had come upon Roland and Eddie shortly after they began their trip up the beach together.

Cuthbert shook his head. “I know what Roland told me some time ago, but I don’t recall him speaking of this boy on the beach, no.”

“I did speak of him,” Roland said. “To both of you. And Alain dreamt of him as well, when we were beneath the mountain, when I - well. I am getting ahead of myself.”

“You went under the mountain alone,” Eddie said. “I remember you talking about that. You left Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum here and went alone and you went on like, a lot, about how scary it was to be alone and how sure you were that you’d killed your buddies here. And then when Cuthbert showed up you thought he was a ghost or something, because you’d been alone for so long.”

Roland nodded. “Yes. I remember that. But I also remember telling you another story, about the boy, about seeing him fall. It’s the distance between those two memories which is pulling my mind apart, I believe.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” Eddie said.

“No. But I do. Or I understand enough to understand my predicament, at least. Alain could surely explain it more thoroughly, and Bert with more grace, but I will tell you what we determined between the three of us: I remember two realities, neither of which can exist so long as the other does. The boy, and his presence or absence, is at the center of both. So let me tell you, now, a story which should be true, but isn’t…”

So saying, he embarked on the tale of the latest leg of his journey, starting in Tull. He spoke of the woman Allie, with her scarred forehead, and of the man Nort who had been brought to life and left as a sort of trap for her or him -

“Or me,” Alain put in quietly. “I did not tell you, but I was sore tempted to go say the word to the man. I plucked it from the air before ever you spoke of it, Roland. At times I still wish I had.” At times he dreamed he was back in Tull - alone, though, with no one else in the whole ruined village save for him and Nort, and while the wind whistled through the smashed storefronts and blew sheets of dust up off the street he went to Nort and took his gnarled hands and said, gently,  _ Nineteen _ , and he heard what Nort had to say, and he woke from those dreams cold and shaking and filled up with a nameless, longing ache.

“A trap for all of us,” Roland said, “or any of us. And who knows how this might have gone had any of us given in to the temptation? Might be we two would have died on the beach without Cuthbert, Eddie, and might be I’d be mad beyond saving already without Alain.”

“And I might be back home eating KFC if it had been you,” Eddie said. The attempted joke fell flat, because there was still, in the back of his mind, very real resentment. His life had been no fairy-tale, but it had been his own, and now it would never be again.

“Might be you’d have died with your brother,” Roland said without rancor. “Might be none of it would have happened. We cannot know. What we do know is that Alain convinced me, once we learned the truth of the man Nort, to leave Tull with haste, and so it was we left…”

And so he told the story. Leaving Tull, clinging to whatever shadow of life it could behind them. Crossing the dry wastes to the edge of the desert proper. The hut-dweller in the wilderness named Brown, who had given them beans and corn and water -  _ death for you, life for the crops  _ \- and stories. The man’s bird, Zoltan, which Cuthbert had spent the evening teaching to swear in the High Speech.

Splitting up across the desert. They took turns, there. Cuthbert told their story, of moving from oasis to oasis at the edge of the great Mohaine, until eventually the water ran out and the mountains rose like fractured bones from the skin of the world. Then he handed the telling of the tale over to Roland, who spoke of his own journey through the center of the wasteland, until at least he had come, dried up and dying, to a waystation where he met a boy and a demon as well.

That was one story. But then there was the other story, the one where Roland met no one at the waystation and took nothing save water. In that story Roland went alone beneath the mountains and was terribly frightened. In that story Roland caught up to the man in black, but at no true cost save that which he had given again and again and again over the course of this strange, long journey: his own self.

Back and forth Roland went, between the two realities which he recalled. Alain paid little attention. He knew the story well, knew the source of the divide well, and knew that no matter how Roland tried to explain it, to define and capture it with words, it would continue to tear him apart.

Eddie and Susannah took the story - the stories - in like confession. In a way, they were. Roland watched them very closely as he spoke, trying to see how they reacted. He knew what he was, and accepted that he could not change his own nature, but they still did not. This would be the first real demonstration, for them, of how mercilessly the need for the Tower drove him. To kill for it was one thing, but to let a child fall to his death was quite another.

_ Go then,  _ Alain thought in that frightened boy’s voice,  _ there are other worlds than these.  _ And then, nonsensically,  _ They’re waiting in the park. Hot cocoa, the good kind with whip on top. Come have a Coke and see the polar bear, but hurry, hurry, time is running out, you can’t be there with him when he sees it. If you’re there it’s all gone wrong. Have the boy draw you a door.  _ He didn’t even know what a  _ polar bear _ was, aside from the obvious meaning.   


With an effort, he pulled himself in closer. He was drifting, half in Roland’s mind but almost entirely out of his own, and the gods above and spirits below only knew from where he’d picked up that stray thought. He tried to focus less on the rhythm of Roland’s thoughts and worries and more on the solid warmth of Cuthbert’s body against his, of the pleasant tingling that followed in the wake of Cuthbert’s long fingers stroking up and down his arm. Let Roland attend, for now, to himself and his ka-tet.

The sudden, explosive pop of the jawbone in the fire startled him badly. He jerked upright, eyes wide, heart in his throat, just in time to see it collapse in on itself and change. He saw the shape of the key, though he knew it wasn’t for him. The rose, though - oh, the blooming rose, the Tower, the world, every world, every world that ever was or would be held thousands deep within each drop of dew nestled between its velvety petals, red as sin, dark as night, dark as the rich good earth from which man had once grown crops in the times before the world moved on and the men all died, and all the worlds where that still went on, all the worlds which had yet to move on - that was for him. That was for all of them. It was everything.

Then the jawbone was gone in a shower of sparks. Bits of burning matter pelted all of them at the edge of the fire. From Roland’s mind, too strong to ignore even with how he was trying to close himself off, Alain got another memory, this one very old and very familiar: standing on Jericho Hill at sunrise and being suddenly pushed aside by Jamie, snapping his gaze around just in time to see Jamie’s head explode in a shower of bone and gore, being bathed in blood and brains, the sharp stinging in his cheeks and forehead as splinters of bone lodged themselves in his skin -   


“What the hell was that for?” demanded Susannah, sharply. “What’d you go and do that for, Roland?”

“I heard the voice of my father,” Roland replied, a bit shakily. In his mind he saw the jawbone exploding in the heart of the fire and over it the image of Jamie’s head being blown apart by a sniper’s bullet, his coppery hair glinting in the morning sun, there one moment and forever gone the next. “I heard the voice of all of my fathers, telling me to do it. Not to follow such a command at once is simply unthinkable. As for what it meant, I cannot say. But I do believe that the bone has spoken its final word, and that I carried it all this way to hear it.”

_ No, _ Alain thought, lowering his head wearily back to Cuthbert’s shoulder.  _ To see it. For one of them to see it. _ But he said nothing. There would be time to speak more of the subject on the morrow. Roland was plainly as exhausted as he was, and raw besides, full of unquiet old ghosts.

They all separated to sleep. Susannah and Eddie were together on one side of the clearing, Cuthbert and Alain on another, and between the two of them Roland lay alone, rolled up in his blanket and his thoughts.

Though he was exhausted, Alain did not fall asleep. He drifted, too tired to keep hold of his own mind. He felt the pleasure and love between Susannah and Eddie, so soft and warm and new and thrilling. He felt Roland’s fear. He dreamed Roland’s dreams of Jake. He dreamed Eddie’s dreams of his city of New York, of the building and the lot and the roses - oh, the roses! so bloody and so brilliant! - and he knew that it was something he needed to remember upon waking. He dreamed Cuthbert’s dream of watching Hax be hanged, only at the end of the rope the man simply dangled and kept speaking, swinging and creaking while the gallows birds sat on his shoulders and pecked at his fat cheeks through the bag over his head, and what he spoke was the litany of doom and pain which they had lived through lo these past decades.

He dreamed his own dreams, eventually, of falling through the dark, of being locked within a bare stone room, of dying somewhere cold and very far from home.

\---

Decency, if nothing else, made her wait until she was reasonably sure the others were asleep before she tried to put her hands on Eddie. Whether or not they  _ really _ were, she didn’t know or care. They were quiet, they were still, and she needed her man. She needed to touch him, feel him, feel his heart beating, feel him moving above her and in her, feel the warm and vital weight of his living body. She needed to know he was okay.

Often, when they made love, she liked to lay back and watch him pumping above her. The way his long hair stuck to his cheeks and shoulders, the way the rosy sex-flush crept down from his face to his neck to his shoulders to his chest, the way his eyes would flutter shut and he’d bite his lip, visible signs of the pleasure he took in her body - all of it made her own pleasure so much sweeter.   


That time, though, she clutched at him. She dug her fingers and her nails into his shoulders and kept him close against her, so that rather than thrusting he had to simply rut and squirm above her. She kissed every part of him she could reach, his mouth and jaw and cheeks, his neck and his shoulders. There was no room for either of them to touch her, not until he finished and she let him roll off of her. Then she took his hand and put it between her legs, and clenched her thighs around his wrist while he rubbed and stroked at her.

Once she reached her climax, she took his wrist again and brought his hand to her mouth, where she licked away the combined wetness of his seed and her own juices. She didn’t exactly care for the taste of semen - too salty, too bitter, and Eddie’s had a hint of that bleachy taste - but right then it was like ambrosia, because it told her that he was there, alive and unharmed.

“Damn, Suze,” Eddie whispered breathlessly once she’d let him go. She lay against him, her head on his chest, listening to the whoosh of his lungs and the thump of his heart. Soon they’d need to readjust their clothes, before they fell asleep like that and then woke up exposed, but right then she wanted to feel his skin. “I might have to go have me a few more near death experiences, if this is the welcome I get afterwards.”

Susannah thwapped his belly with the back of her hand. “Don’t you even joke, Eddie. I was so scared when I saw you up that tree with that monster down there trying to shake you loose. I was so sure I was gonna miss and just make the thing mad, make it try to hurt you even more…”

Eddie brought his hand up to scritch at her scalp. “Yeah, but you didn’t. You did great. And I figure shit like that is just gonna happen, you know? We’re in monster world.”

He was right. It was still too fresh, though, for her to entirely let go of the fear. There had been plenty of people in her life who she’d cared for, but in many ways she had still been terribly lonely. Certainly there had never been anyone she’d been so close to, felt so strongly for. Some part of her had always held itself apart - and she suspected the same was true of Eddie. Had they been marked, then, their whole lives, for this quest? Earmarked for later use of Roland Deschain?

“Where’d they  _ go _ , anyway? I know they couldn’t have known, but that’s just why we gotta stick together.” She wasn’t angry at Cuthbert and Alain anymore, hadn’t really been in the first place, but there was still that nagging sense of - well, call it worry, maybe. Concern. Sticking together in hostile territory was important. Susannah knew all about that.

Eddie grunted vaguely. “No idea. They didn’t say, just said they were heading off. Ha, maybe -” his voice dropped a bit, took on a teasing, leering tone, and he reached over with his other hand to tweak Susannah’s nipple - “maybe they were after a spot of afternoon delight.”

“Eddie Dean,” Susannah said with mock severity. She slapped his pinching hand away, even though it made her breath hitch and hot desire surge up in her. Evidently her body wasn’t as satisfied as her mind was with Eddie’s safety.   


“No,” he protested, laughter in his voice now, “I’m serious! It’s like prison rules in the cowboy apocalypse. Can you imagine how long it’s been since either of ‘em had any company but their own hand?”

Wrinkling her nose, Susannah said, “Don’t. One, it’s crude. Two, I don’t want to think about that.” Still, the thought struck a chord. She levered herself up on one elbow and gazed across the camp to where Cuthbert and Alain slept. It was dark, but the moon was high and bright, the sky free of clouds, and this area they were in was very open, and so she could see them well enough. They laid close together, Cuthbert curled around Alain with his head on his chest, one of Alain’s arms around his narrow shoulders - very nearly the same way that Susannah was laying with her man, in fact.

If they were a man and a woman, she would already have assumed they were involved. It was the way they always seemed to orbit each other, the way they were always touching each other, the way they laid down so close to sleep each night. It was Roland who’d collapsed, who was being torn apart in his own mind, but Cuthbert had given that tonic to Alain first - and sat with an arm around him all though Roland’s tale, rubbing his shoulder and the side of his head, un-self-consciously intimate.   


She remembered one of the nights they’d spent in the cave - the cave with one room, one wide bed - when Cuthbert had sat on the floor and leaned his head against Alain’s knee, and every so often Alain had reached down - as unconsciously as Cuthbert had touched him this evening - to stroke his hair or touch his shoulder.

The way Eddie put it was crude, but... Crude wasn’t the same as wrong, though. She thought of the carefully sewn garments stowed in her own pack, washed and well-worn, which could only have been made for a woman. One of them had kept those for who knew how long, so once there must have been a woman, but the only one she’d ever heard spoken of was the Allie who Roland had briefly taken up with in that town on the edge of the desert.

They’d been alone together for a long time, and a body had needs, didn’t it? It wasn’t so hard to imagine that they’d taken comfort in each other.

And if it made Susannah a little uncomfortable, well - it wasn’t that bad, really. She’d known homosexuals, back in what she already thought of as her other life. Plenty of the women’s libber types had been lesbians, and they’d been just fine to know, hardly ever made her feel strange. Dr. King hadn’t liked the homosexuals, and there had been sort of a calculus of respectability in the Movement - wasn’t that the way it always was? Plenty of those women’s libbers had been racist, and plenty of the folks in the Movement had been sexist, and folks in both of those groups had preferred the homosexuals and the transvestites keep their distance.

But her friend Leon  _ had _ been - as one of the billy club swingers of Oxford Town had so crudely called him - a fag. (Though not, as far as Susannah knew, a pinko of any stripe.) Crude, after all, wasn’t the same as wrong. She had never minded Leon. And if those two wanted to take what comfort they might find in each other, who was she to say they shouldn’t? Out here, where more likely than not they were all going to die and rot under this alien sun without ever seeing another human face, why not?   


It was, after all, far less worrying than what Roland had just told them about himself.   


As if he could sense the flow of her thoughts, Eddie said quietly, all traces of humor gone from his voice, “That’s a pretty fucked up thing ol’ long, tall, and ugly just laid on us, huh?”

“Yeah.” She ran her fingers down Eddie’s chest. “I guess I’m not surprised. That man is  _ cold _ .”

“You know what he told me on the beach, when I asked what the fuck was going on? He said all this about his quest, about the Tower, and he said - we’ll probably both die on the way, but before we do, we’ll be glorious. Something like that.”   


“Aren’t you scared?” she asked him. “About what he might do? Like, if it’s one of us - what do you think he would do?” But she knew, before Eddie even answered. She knew what sort of man Roland was. Terrible, in that he inspired terror. Awful, in that he inspired awe. Unknowable.   


“I guess he’d let us fall. I don’t know.” His fingers slowed their stroking of her scalp, and his hand flattened out to cup her head. “I guess I figure I’ve been living on borrowed time for a while now, you know? Since everything that happened with Henry for sure. Maybe even before then. I can’t say I’m like, a selfless guy, you know? I don’t want it to run out. I don’t want to throw myself in front of any trains. But I figure that whatever I get is more than what I was gonna, so - I don’t know. I don’t wanna think about it. Hell,” he said with a short, forced laugh, “maybe it won’t even be a problem. Seems like he’s cracking up pretty fast.”

“It does. I hope we can fix it before he really goes… all the way.” All the way what, she wasn’t sure. Mad, maybe. She had an idea, though she couldn’t say why, that the strain of it might just kill him. That maybe he’d turn one of those ancient guns on himself if it got too bad. “I wonder how long Alain will be able to keep him going.”

“Yeah, I wonder what he even did in the first place.” Eddie was quiet a moment, then said, softly, “That guy kinda freaks me out too, sometimes. You sorta forget, I guess, and then he does some spooky shit and it’s like, oh, right. We sure the hell are not in Kansas anymore.”

“We sure aren’t.” Susannah shifted, trying to move away from something hard and pokey beneath the thin blanket on which they laid. It didn’t work. Finally, she sat up and adjusted her clothes for another layer of protection from the twigs and pebbles and old, dry needles that carpeted the ground. “What do you think we’ll do if he doesn’t get better, though?”

“Dunno,” said Eddie, as he followed her lead in tugging his clothes back into place. It was easier to pull one’s pants up, no doubt, when one had knees to get up on, and didn’t have to sort of wallow around on one’s back tugging. “I guess the other two would probably keep going, and we’d need to keep following them, at least until we found a city or a village or something. ‘S’not like we can survive on our own out here. I guess I’d like to see this Tower of his for my own sake, if it comes to that.”

“I guess so, yeah.” Privately, Susannah wasn’t so sure. That they couldn’t yet survive on their own, she knew to be true. That Roland’s quest was now  _ their _ quest, would be even if Roland fell - that was up in the air, as far as she was concerned.

She kept imagining that poor little boy, was the thing. She kept seeing his little white hands holding onto the crumbling trestle, his scared white face floating in the darkness, and then she heard him speak and she saw him fall down into the darkness, and she wondered how long he’d fallen for. How long he’d had to know that the man in whose hands he’d placed his life had opened those hands up and let him fall. And sure, Roland hadn’t been able to kill him a second time, but that was just guilt after the fact, wasn’t it? He’d still done it the first time.

How little time it had taken him to arrive at that state! A few weeks on his own in the desert and there’d been hardly anything human left of him.   


Cuthbert and Alain, she knew, were ready to die for him. They’d already died for him, she sensed, time and time again. They were living on time as borrowed as Eddie’s. Susannah didn’t exactly miss her life in the old world as fiercely as she ought to - no one here called her names, no one here cared about the color of her skin or the shape of her nose or the texture of her hair - but she had been perfectly alive, perfectly content. She’d already  _ had _ a purpose.

So no, she wasn’t ready to die. And if it came down to it - if it came down to a choice between Roland or herself, Roland or Eddie - if she found herself looking down at two frightened faces, two sets of grasping hands, and the darkness below?

Well. She knew which choice she would make.


	18. Chapter 18

Eddie was almost grateful to be woken up by the bear’s unearthly bellowing the next morning. Parts of his dream faded almost immediately into obscurity, into that vague impressionistic state that dreams took upon waking, where all one could remember was that it had all been very meaningful moments before. Other parts of it remained unpleasantly clear and vivid: the Tower, the field of roses, the creeping horror he’d felt at standing in that massive shadow, Jack Andolini -  _ that train runs through every one of ‘em, but if you get it started then your troubles are just beginning  _ \- and even the deli, Tom and Gerry’s Artistic Deli, somehow that name jangled against the inside of his brain. He’d never known the place, but it felt important.

He tried to occupy himself with his morning chores instead of dwelling on it. The mundane routine did help, but evidently it still showed on his face, because within a few moments of getting a good look at him, Susannah asked if he was alright. 

“I’m fine,” he said with a tired smile. “Just had a bad dream.”

“There is often truth in dreams,” Roland remarked. “I would hear of yours.”

“I don’t really remember.” Not exactly true, but Eddie had a split-second feeling that he didn’t yet want to share. He didn’t know what the dream even  _ meant _ , and he wanted time to think on it. 

Roland looked steadily at him, his eyes so pale and blue. Then he glanced wordlessly over to Alain, who sat on the boulder which had yesterday held Susannah’s targets, attending to his grooming. In one hand he held a thin sheet of metal, slightly curved and polished to a highly reflective sheen. In the other he held a comb, which he combed out his silvery beard with.

Normally, the three gunslingers were the first awake. Cuthbert was still off in the woods somewhere - Eddie had a vague idea that he liked to wake up early and give himself as much of a wash as he could, when he had some privacy and quiet to do it in - but Alain looked rumpled and half-awake enough that Eddie suspected he, too, had been dragged from sleep by the mechanical bear’s hollering. 

Maybe he saw Roland’s glance reflected in the mirror. Maybe he just  _ felt _ it. Either way, he paused, lowered the mirror, and looked the two of them over, his mild face thoughtful.

A flash of resentment went through Eddie. He didn’t like the idea of any of them poking around in his dreams, in his head. Nor did he like the idea that if he said he didn’t want to share, why, then Roland could just go ask his psychic buddy - and after yesterday’s little display, there wasn’t much doubt at all left inside Eddie that the man really was psychic. He’d done  _ something _ , that was for damn sure, and already Roland looked less haggard, less worn.

Alain met Eddie’s eyes, and in that moment Eddie  _ knew _ that he knew, that he’d seen some or all of what Eddie dreamed. Maybe not on purpose, maybe not because he’d gone looking, but he’d seen it.

Then he shrugged. “It’s up to him to tell you or not, Roland.” And so saying, he went back to his mirror. Every so often, a minute tremble went through his hands. The bright morning light reflecting off the makeshift mirror flickered around when it did.

Eddie felt a curious mixture of gratitude and further resentment. It was a very  _ Henry _ sort of feeling. Alain  _ could _ have told, but chose not to, which meant at some point in the future he might decide he  _ should _ tell - in Eddie’s experience, that meant he was being put on notice of that fact. That future decisions would be made taking his behavior into account. That Eddie  _ owed him one _ , this favor to be extracted at a later date of the owee’s choosing.

Shortly afterward, Cuthbert came trotting back into the camp, his hair wet and slicked flat against his head. “My,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the unearthly bellowing of the bear, “that thing sure is noisy, isn’t it? I’d say we’re at danger of going deaf, at the very least.”

“That must be, like, your personal nightmare,” Eddie said. “All these people around and no one to hear you talk?” It came out a bit waspish - he was tired, and rattled from what had just happened, and from the talk last night - but Cuthbert just laughed.

“Say true, Eddie. It should be yours as well, for how else would you entertain us on our long journey, save with your lively mouth?” And then, just as Eddie was wondering whether or not he’d  _ meant _ that to sound as weirdly flirty as it had, he tipped a very deliberate wink.

\---

It took them two days to find the bear’s den. The first day they made slow but steady progress through the woods, which changed gradually in composition from the open corridors of old spruce to wilder, thicker growth. Great leafy bushes and thorny shrubs sprang up in between stands of deciduous trees, and the ground became wetter and less smooth. At one point they found themselves sloshing through a marshy area which was not quite a real swamp, but probably would have been if it had been rainier lately.

While they walked, Roland talked more about the boy and what had happened to him. Spooky shit, really. It still troubled Eddie to think of how easily Roland described letting the kid drop, how dispassionately. Worse was the ease with which he had accepted it. He hadn’t even really been  _ surprised _ . Had Roland’s buddies been? He couldn’t imagine so.

All that day he thought, helplessly, about what Roland said, about having to live with a memory of your own death. Not foreknowledge of it, not an idea of how it would happen, not even a near-death experience - Eddie had had more than one of those in his short and ill-fated life - but a real  _ memory _ of it  _ actually happening. _

And if it was taking Roland like this, just to know that the kid had died and not died, been there and not been there - Roland, who was one of the most stubborn, strong-willed motherfuckers Eddie had ever encountered in his life, who seemed like he could probably bend reality around the strength of his convictions - then, hell, what must it be like for the kid? Just a regular kid from regular old Earth, not even a kid from this spooky death-world where people were psychic and time didn’t work right.

That night, after dinner but before everyone split up to go to sleep, Alain came and sat awkwardly in front of him and Susannah, his bad leg stretched out stiffly. “Eddie, Susannah,”  he said softly, so that no one else could hear, or at least couldn’t make out the words he said. “I’m - I would speak with the both of you. It’s true I often dream the dreams of those near me. I don’t go poking about your sleeping mind for my own amusement, you understand. At night my mind’s attachment to me - my body is less secure, and it goes drifting, and we five are tied close together by ka.”

Eddie waved a hand dismissively. “It’s fine, man.” It wasn’t, but he didn’t really want to have this discussion. He wanted, as much as possible, to pretend that he could be alone in his head.

“It’s not.” Alain looked into the fire, then down at his own lap, and was silent for a time. “You two feel uneasy about this ability. Is true of folk from this world, as well. Few so are gifted, and it is not well understood. Normally I might let you continue to feel as you do, but we must be companions for a good long time. There must be trust between us.”

“We trust you,” Susannah protested. “We trust you just fine.”

A slow smile curled the edges of Alain’s mouth. “No. You believe your secrets are not safe. You dislike feeling this way. It is mortifying to be so known. It’s difficult to know people so, as well, whether I will it or not. This morning, I could have told Roland what I recalled of your dreams, Eddie. It wasn’t to put you in my debt that I did not. It was because they are yours, as are your thoughts. If you do not wish to share with them,, then I won’t share what I know until you wish it to be so. This is how I keep the privacy of men who I cannot help but know more intimately than either perhaps of us would like. Do you understand?”

“Does it bother you?” That wasn’t an answer to the question, but Eddie wasn’t sure how he wanted to answer. He got what the guy was saying, sure, but he didn’t know if he believed it. Not, as Roland put it, in his deep-down mind. “That we think your whole, uh, thing is weird?”

Alain shrugged, and was again quiet for a time. “As I said, it is not an uncommon way to think about it. Even in Gilead. There my touch was recognized and it made me valuable. More perhaps than my - than any talent of my body, do’ee kennit? It made folk uneasy. I can understand.” Which was, Eddie noted, master prevaricator that he was, also not exactly an answer to the question. “It’s not for the sake of my own feelings or ease that I speak to you, though. Nor necessarily to put the two of you at your ease, though I would like to do so. For the sake of the tet, it is important that the two of you understand I am not snooping, nor will I hold what I may feel or hear or see over you.”

“So it’s kinda like living in an apartment with thin walls,” said Eddie. “Pretending you don’t know your neighbor likes being called  _ daddy _ during sex or whatever.”

Alain’s eyebrows rose. So did Susannah’s. But after a moment, he said, voice tinged with amusement, “Yes, I suppose that’s a way of - an apt way of putting it.”

Susannah put her head to the side and said, curiously, “But what if you think you  _ need _ to tell? Like one of us is keeping a secret and you think it’s important? I mean, what if you thought Eddie’s dreams were a prophecy or something?” There was a self-conscious air of skepticism to her tone when she said the word ‘prophecy’.

“Gods above, my lady, it’s hard enough to decipher such dreams when they’re given to you specifically!” He fell into that thoughtful silence again. Not a man who was hasty with his words, was Alain, which Eddie could not relate to but thought was probably a pretty smart way to be. 

“I cannot,” he said at last, frowning vaguely into the middle distance, “promise that there will never come a time I believe the good of the group outweighs any one man’s right to privacy. I would not promise such to Roland or Bert, either. All I can promise is that I would not ever decide so on a whim, nor speak of your inner thoughts without first speaking to you.”

He didn’t seem like the whim type, either. Also not something Eddie could relate to. Until recently, Eddie had just sort of drifted wherever life took him, and made decisions as they came. He supposed he was, to a degree, still doing that -  how else could he explain being caught up in this bizarre carnival ride?

“ _ Do _ you think it was a prophecy or something?” Eddie asked, curious in spite of himself. That might explain why it all had stuck with him so vividly, even now after a whole day of work and walking. There had been the usual dream weirdness, but in a way he’d known he was dreaming, and now that he was awake it felt like more than  _ just _ normal dream stuff. 

Alain shrugged. “It may have been. I don’t recall it as well as you likely do, for I did not experience it so directly. If so, it was one meant for you, and the symbols within it have meaning to you that they would not for me. I would counsel you to think well on it, and keep it in mind should you have any more unusual dreams.”

Now Susannah was looking at Eddie, clearly curious herself. “What  _ did _ you dream about, anyway? Do you think it was, you know… special?”

“I really don’t know. It was just some weird stuff. It might be something.” Eddie suspected, though, that it likely was. That seemed to be the way things were going. The Tower, the deli, Jack Andolini telling him about the train - god, what wouldn’t he give to take a nice subway ride somewhere instead of walking all goddamn day? “If I have another one, I’ll tell you all about ‘em both, okay, Suze?”

“Okay,” Susannah said. He got the impression that she wasn’t entirely satisfied with that, though, but knew she wouldn’t get anywhere by pushing. He supposed he’d probably end up sharing with her sooner or later. That was part of the whole deal, wasn’t it? You shared things with your lover. And Susannah was a lot more than just a part-time girlfriend, already. 

It was on that thought - his guts shivering with a combination of uneasiness and giddiness, the fear of commitment and the joy of finding someone who he thought he might actually want to commit  _ to _ \- that Eddie drifted off to sleep. He had no dreams that he could remember.

\---

The next day, by noon, they came to a part of the forest that looked like a tornado had gone through. Everywhere trees had been dragged down and smashed, creating a strangely contradictory landscape. Above a certain height, all was clear and open and empty, but down lower the ground was an impenetrable jumble of low-growing shrubs and fallen trees.

“He cleared out the sightlines,” said Roland. “Our friend the bear didn’t want any surprises. He may have been large, but he wasn’t complacent.”

“Do you think he left  _ us _ any surprises?” Eddie asked sourly.

Smiling faintly, Roland clapped him on the shoulder. “Maybe, but take heart - they’ll be  _ old _ surprises.”

And that was really the high point of that day. 

Though most of the downed trees were old enough to be rotting back into the earth, they still posed a formidable obstacle. Forward progress did not, strictly speaking, happen. It was all sidelong, sidling between wreckage and clambering over deadfalls which could not be gone through or around. Had all of them been able-bodied, it would have been wearying enough, but between Susannah needing to be hauled on someone’s back and Alain’s bum leg, it became downright perilous. More than once they came to a place where, perhaps, Eddie and Cuthbert might have been able to go over, and even Roland would have managed with Susannah on his back, but there was no way Alain could get up and across it. When that happened, they had to detour around.

No one ever exactly  _ said _ so. Cuthbert took point, by virtue of being the nimblest and least encumbered among them, often clambering far ahead and then looping back around to direct the slower-moving members of the party. More than once Eddie watched him climb halfway up a nasty clog of splintered tree limbs, look over whatever it was he saw there, and then jump down and lead them around it, sometimes very far out of their way.

As the sun started its slow descent to the far horizon, Eddie thought - more than once - about suggesting they split up. He wasn’t eager to be alone in the woods again, not at all, but he envisioned maybe himself and Susannah and Roland going one way, and Cuthbert leading Alain the long way around - but more than a little guiltily. It wasn’t any more right to leave the guy behind than it would be to begrudge Susannah not having legs and leave her.

Still, he was starting to think they were going to have to spend the night camped out in the blasted, ruined stretch of forest, when all at once they cleared a tangle of deadfall and came upon a thin screen of intact alders. 

There Cuthbert had halted to wait for the rest of them. Roland slowed to a stop as well, and held his hand up for the other two. He shrugged off Susannah’s carrying harness and lowered her into her chair, which Eddie had dragged and wrestled along all day.

“Susannah,” he said, “give Eddie your gun.”

“And why am I doing that for?” Susannah asked, even as she pulled it from its holster and held it out over her shoulder to Eddie, butt first.

“The place we seek is beyond yon trees. Eddie and I will explore it first, perhaps do a little work.”

“Work?” asked Eddie. Hesitantly, he took the gun. Whatever it was Roland had planned, he had an idea he didn’t like it, but he wasn’t about to dig his feet in over nothing. “What kinda work we talking here?”

“Open your ears.” Roland gestured impatiently towards the little copse of trees.

Eddie listened, and realized what he had known in what Roland and company called his  _ undermind _ for quite some time: from beyond the trees came the sound of machinery. Not healthy machinery, either; there was a deep, bone-shaking rumble, but with a catch in it, like a dicky heart that threw an extra trill into its beat every so often, and layered over that sound were a variety of sharper, shriller, brighter ones. It reminded him of nothing so much as the sound of a real lemon of a car chugging its way down the street. Where he was from, people drove whatever they could get their hands on that ran for as long as it’d run, and then a couple years after until it realized it was dead and stopped for good. Whatever was on the other side of the trees sounded like it was right on that point, held together by duct tape and prayer.

He didn’t really want to leave Susannah, but she wouldn’t exactly be alone. He supposed that if he didn’t trust her with two of their three resident gunslingers, then he might as well just plug her and himself with the gun in his hand, because they were toast.

“What do you think it is?” he asked Roland in a low voice as the made their way into the screen of intact trees.

“Hush your mouth,” Roland replied, “and we’ll find out.”

\---

The ground was too uneven for Susannah to maneuver herself around in the chair, but she was grateful for the chance to sit in a seat which had been made with comfort in mind, rather than the stitched seat of the carrying harness, which inevitably rubbed her fundament quite raw. 

Cuthbert and Alain, too, took the opportunity for a rest. Alain prodded a couple of nearby logs with his heavy staff until he found one which satisfied, and then settled himself slowly down onto it, letting loose a sigh as he did. 

Cuthbert plopped down next to him. Very close, Susannah couldn’t help but notice, so that they were nearly touching from shoulder to hip. 

“I can’t say I’m unhappy for a rest,” he remarked, “but I’d love to see whatever work it is Roland thinks waits beyond these trees.”

“I just hope they get back before sundown,” said Susannah. Even with the company of the other two, she didn’t like the look of these woods, not at all. The utter destruction was just too spooky. There was a sense of something lying in wait, just out of sight, able to see them even though they couldn’t see it. Once upon a time, that had been the bear, and now without the bear’s presence - fearsome as it would have been - the place felt desolate.

“Oh, have no fear. If Roland suspected any true difficulty, I doubt he’d have taken only Eddie along. Probably he’s holding school. You’ve had a bit of an advantage there, you know.” He tipped Susannah one of those carefully deliberate one-eyed winks, and then turned to look with open concern at Alain, who’d dropped his head into one hand as if it troubled him. “Are you well?”

Alain drew in a deep, shaky breath and then blew it out in another sigh before answering. “Well enough. Well enough. It’s the Beam. We’re very near it. It  _ pulls _ at me, is all.”

“It’ll have all the five of us soon enough,” said Cuthbert, though he still looked worried.

Her thoughts of the night before were very close to the top of her mind. He sat so close, and looked so worried, and spoke so tenderly, and had guided them around the spots which Alain could not hope to struggle through so automatically, as if it were simply second nature - Susannah was about to say something, to ask them, though she did not know what exactly she meant to ask, when the silence was splintered by gunshots.

Alain and Cuthbert both jolted upright, tense and taut and staring in the direction from which the shots had come, ready to be off in a moment if they felt it needed. Five shots, then silence, and then three more - and then silence.

Susannah slipped out of her chair and began swinging herself along the ground. “I want to see what that was all about,” she said.

“Agreed.” A pair of hands caught her beneath the armpits and lifted her. A moment later she sat straddling Cuthbert’s narrow shoulders, held the same way that Roland had held her two days ago when they’d run to Eddie’s rescue. A shiver of reminiscence went through her. “Sorry to handle you so, my lady, but we best be speedy.”

He didn’t wait for Alain, either, but went trotting through the woods as fast as he could manage in the dying light. Susannah ducked over his head, not wanting to be brained by a passing tree branch. He was good about minding her height above his own, although still the odd branch whipped or scratched at her.

When they were nearly to the clearing, there came a shout - very loud, definitely Roland’s voice. It sounded so close, but still the man was out of sight.  _ DOWN _ , Roland hollered, and then there was another gunshot, and ringing silence.

They emerged into the clearing to find Eddie and Roland both perfectly well. Between the two of them lay some twisted mechanical thing - to Susannah’s eyes it looked a bit like a bird which had, perhaps, run hard into a nearly-invisible high-rise window. Beyond them was the dusty, bone-littered clearing where the bear had denned, dotted with odd humped shapes she realized after a moment were rusted mechanical hulks. 

An image came to her: the clearing looking almost idyllic in the bright light of day, sunlight glinting off the babbling brook, the great bear resting there in health, glossy and sleek and huge, while all around it little machines bustled to and fro with great purpose, seeing to the needs of its organic and mechanical parts. In her imagination, the bear shifted, and revealed a trio of grey-feathered arrows sticking from its rump, very nearly where Susannah herself had put a bullet. Several of the little machines rushed over to tend to it; one pulled the arrows free and two others saw to the wounds. One pumped some sort of fluid into the holes - disinfectant, maybe? The other extruded a long, narrow cylinder which, when touched to the bear’s flesh, produced a spark and a whiff of smoke. She could almost smell it, burnt hair and cooked meat and hot metal -

She was pulled away. Not roughly, no, but led towards some gentle but irresistible tugging force, until she emerged once more inside of herself, in the present moment. She was perched atop Cuthbert’s shoulders, looking down at the crown of his head - up this close she could see that there were actually plenty of fine silvery strands among the inky blackness of his hair. She could feel the heat of his shoulders beneath her legs, his neck between her thighs, his hands on her hips holding her steady. 

A third hand rested near where her knee would be if she had one anymore. That hand was very white in the gathering twilight, the back and knuckles dusted with curling pale hair. Susannah followed the hand back to a thick wrist and a similarly hairy arm, and then to Alain’s face, his eyes fixed on her.

“Where is it you go wandering?” he asked her. 

“I - I don’t know,” she said, truthfully, a little frightened. She didn’t know, and hadn’t even been aware until he’d pulled her back that she  _ had _ wandered. Now that she knew, though, it seemed as if she had before, didn’t it?

“Best not do it here,” Alain said, his face and voice very serious. “You might just be carried off. Do you feel it?”

She found that she did. What she felt, she couldn’t say, but it was very much  _ there _ regardless of her ability to describe it with words. Some great and unspeakable force, something far beyond any human mind -

At the edge of the clearing stood a metal structure. In the dying light she could see that it was colored like a wasp, black and yellow in thick warning stripes across its front. She felt no desire to go near it. A deep humming came from it, rattling in her bones, vibrating her teeth in her gums. Magnetic, in the sense that it both repelled her and attracted her - despite not  _ wanting _ to go to it, she felt drawn anyway, and likely would have made her way across the clearing to touch it had she not been held in place on Cuthbert’s shoulders.

Eddie was not similarly bound in place, and so he did walk across the clearing to it. He put his hands flat on it and rested his forehead against it. 

Susannah got a glimpse of how, perhaps, she had looked moments before. Eddie did not exactly change, but nonetheless, something vital changed about him. It went away. His body still stood, but it seemed rubbery, posed, like a department store mannequin. His face was blank. His chest barely moved. He looked very much the way Alain had when he’d gone inside Roland’s head two days ago.

That comparison frightened her. Alain and Roland had stayed that way, unmoving, barely breathing, blank and unanimated, for hours. She could not bear the thought of watching Eddie stand there pressed up against that awful box all night.

“All is silent in the halls of the dead,” he whispered, his voice flat and terrible in the still, silent air. It was a grave voice. “All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. Behold the stairways which stand in darkness; behold the rooms of ruin. These are the halls of the dead where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.”

Before he could say more, Roland took him by the shoulder and pulled him away. Susannah could have kissed the man for it. Never again did she want to see that terrible emptiness on Eddie’s face or hear it in his voice.

“We’ll camp over yonder,” Roland said, waving his hand to indicate a place still within the part of the woods which was whole and unruined, but well aware from the clearing with its restless, grasping ghosts. No one protested in the least.

That night, there was little talk around the campfire. They ate and then they separated into their three distinct groups for sleep, although none of them went far. Susannah held on tightly to Eddie, her head on his chest, listening once more to his heartbeat. Roland was close enough that Eddie could have rolled over, reached out, and touched him, and beyond him lay Cuthbert and Alain, similarly entwined and similarly close.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alain has a dream. Cuthbert tells a story.

Alain closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he was in a strange city. It was the city from Eddie’s dream the other night, but this time he did not simply see the dream as Eddie did. This time, he stood there in his own self.

The city teemed with folk. Had even a quarter of them been real, he might well have been overwhelmed by the sheer press of all those minds. They weren’t, but even in a dream, being surrounded by such a mass of people made him want to bolt.

When he’d turned twelve, he’d been deemed old enough to chaperone his sister Claire when she took a whim to go to market in the low town. There’d never been much need for him to step outside the castle grounds, and being a somewhat reclusive young man, that was the first time he’d been down there. He’d found it dizzying, overwhelming, such a profusion of sights and sounds and smells and voices and minds that he’d had a pounding headache by the time they came back.

Gilead’s low town remained the most crowded place he’d ever been. Just now, though, he thought that every man, woman, and child who’d lived in the settlement could have been swallowed easily up by the rushing crowds of folk that went to and fro in this city that sprang from Eddie’s memories.

They flowed around Alain, some giving him dirty looks or even bumping roughly into him, for he stood in the center of the paved walk alongside the street. Though he knew himself to be in the way, he couldn’t entirely care, not when these people weren’t real. The placement of his body in the dream had to be meaningful, and he didn’t intend to leave unless he felt drawn in some direction.

As he waited, he looked about. The main thoroughfare was obviously a street, but just as obviously nothing like the streets he’d known during his life. Even the widest paved streets in Gilead could not compare to the width of this one. Black it was, painted with vivid yellow and white marks, and wide enough to permit countless shining trains of queer, self-propelled vehicles to travel in each direction. There was not a horse to be seen, nor a mule, nor even a hand-cart.

On either side of the street rose up unimaginably tall buildings. They soared, so high that as Alain looked up he experienced the dizzying certainty that they were leaning in towards each other and must, soon, fall. How they could stand up under their own weight, he had no idea. And the glass - ! The art of making glass had been a jealously guarded one in his own time, known to few, and never had he seen it in such quantities. Here it shone from every building. Some of them had entire fronts made of nothing but glass. How such a place could possibly be defended, Alain - who had grown up in a castle made to survive war - could not imagine. This was truly a soft world, and a prosperous one.

Shortly his patience was rewarded. Eddie came walking down towards him, marked somehow as more vital and real and present than any of the dream-shades. He was somewhat better groomed than in waking life, with his hair tied back, and dressed in very fine clothing. The cut and fabrics were unfamiliar to Alain, but it was close enough to the formal attire he’d once known to be recognizable. Seeing Eddie, of all people, so dressed was somewhat incongruous, but it surely had meaning.

Eddie glanced at him. A flash of recognition came over his face, and he nodded in greeting, but then continued on his way. Alain turned to follow him, for surely what Eddie was seeking was what they were here to see - only for the ground to buckle and roll beneath his feet, spilling him onto his front. As he tried to stand up, the shaking continued -

\- he woke up, at first convinced he had suffered another shaking fit in his sleep. It had happened before. Sometimes, although not always, it woke Bert.

This time, though, it was Bert who woke him. Bert was shaking him. He struggled blearily into consciousness, forcing his eyes open. Once he saw that Alain was awake, he pointed silently across the camp. Alain rolled over, propping himself up, and looked.

Between the two of them and Eddie and Susannah’s huddled sleeping forms, Roland rolled restlessly back and forth. He muttered, incoherently as if in the grip of a fever, and then as they watched his voice rose in a hoarse shout. It was the boy’s name he shouted: Jake.

Cuthbert rose and crept towards Roland, silent as the night itself. Quick as a cat, he snatched up the gun that lay within Roland’s reach. Its twin still rode with Susannah, so there was only the one to contend with. Normally neither of them would think of taking their dinh’s guns in such a fashion, but Alain himself still bore the scars of having once caught Roland by surprise, and he had been in much more lucid and less divided a state then, too.

Once he saw that Cuthbert had Roland’s gun in hand, Alain shifted himself gracelessly across the ground to be near enough to take Roland’s head in his hands. That Roland did not wake at either the scraping sound of his approach nor his touch disturbed him more than the feverish dream-shouting did.

Susannah swung herself closer, her eyes very wide and white in her shadowed face. “I thought you already fixed him up,” she whispered, as if not wishing to wake Roland.

Roland’s hair was damp with sweat, his pulse pounding in his temples. Alain could nearly feel the immense pressure pushing against the inside of his skull. Vividly the image came to him of Roland’s head simply falling to pieces in his hands, like an egg gripped too firmly.

“It didn’t last,” he said. “I cannot heal the division in him, only separate his warring halves, and that not for very long. It is not within my power to knit together the two realities he is living in.”

“Well, can’t you, like -” Eddie spoke and then stopped, making a frustrated noise. “If you can put half his brain in psychic time-out, can’t you build, I don’t know, a wall or something in there?”

The image Eddie’s words conjured was charming, and honestly fairly close to what he had done. He recalled, again, the mental projection of picking one of Roland’s divided halves up by the scruff and carrying him bodily to a different part of the tower - there had been a certain satisfaction to it, he had to admit.

“No,” he said. “That is not within my abilities. Now hush, please, and let me attend to him.”

It was worse inside Roland’s head than it had been the first time. There was rubble on the floor, cracks in the wall, and the stairs of the tower groaned beneath his feet as he climbed. Even when he spread the glow of his own power, when he worked his will on the place, it did not quite go back to its former state of repair. And the two halves of Roland who fought so viciously with each other were harder to calm and separate, as well.

\---

Once it was clear that Alain was in the same freaky trance-state he’d been in a couple days ago, Cuthbert got up and beckoned the two of them over, to the other side of the guttering fire. Eddie scooped Susannah up, as much to help her as because he wanted the reassuring weight and warmth of her in his arms, and followed.

Crouching down, Cuthbert methodically fed wood into the fire to build it up. “I wish to make some matters clear to the two of you,” he said, not looking up from the fire, “regarding Alain’s abilities.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, “I guess he isn’t Superman, huh? Disappointing, really. You build up all that hype and -”

“Hush your mouth.” There was no particular heat in Cuthbert’s voice, but his tone was unusually serious. Eddie hushed his mouth. Having strengthened the fire, Cuthbert stood up and turned to face the two of them. “He’s very strong. I would wager there are less than a dozen men alive on the planet who are his equal in the art of the touch, with all of the studying and practice he’s done over the years. There are those who believe men who possess the touch are something other than men. That’s hogwash, of course. He’s simply a man, as human as any of us, nothing less or more, who happens to possess a particular ability. Damned useful, but not without its drawbacks.”

“He’s no miracle-worker,” said Susannah. “That’s what you’re saying?”

“I suppose it depends on how one defines a miracle.” Cuthbert began pulling his shirt out where it was tucked into his pants, though it had come partially untucked already in his sleep. Once he had it out completely, he rolled it quickly and efficiently most of the way up his chest, front and back. The flickering firelight turned his bare skin to bronze and shadow.

The man was skinny. There were faint shadows visible between each row of ribs, and his hipbones stuck way out. Even in the low, shifting light, it was obvious he was covered in scars, the same way Roland had been when Eddie had first met him with his shirt practically rotting off his body.

“So, is the peep show for morale, or -?” Eddie could not keep his smart mouth from asking.

Cuthbert smiled, crooked and sharp. “Why, you may take whatever pleasure out of looking on me that you can, Eddie. Susannah as well. But no, this is, alas, simply educational. Do you see here, and here?” He touched two round, puckered scars that could only have been bullet holes, one high on the right side of his chest and one to the left of his navel. Then he turned around and hiked the back of his shirt up further, so they could see his back. 

Amid the welter of scars there - mostly old, criss-crossing stripes that Eddie, who had never seen a man flogged, nevertheless could only imagine were from being whipped, and lower down a fresher set that looked like something had raked him with terrible claws - were two huge exit wounds which corresponded exactly to the placement of the bullet wounds he’d pointed out on his front.

“Should we start calling you Jesus?” Eddie asked, his voice cracking a bit in his uneasiness. “Because -”

“I saw that one before,” Susannah said. She reached out and, very gently, touched a fingertip to the exit wound right beside the knobbly valley of his spine. “When you showed me the other ones from the bear. I thought that didn’t look like you could have survived it.”

Cuthbert dropped his shirt and turned, not bothering to tuck it in. He still wore that hard-edged, knifelike smile. “You were right, my lady. This one -” he touched his chest - “collapsed my lung. T’other blew half my guts out my back, and missed my spine only by the dubious grace of whatever gods may look upon such a sinner as me. I took four others, one or two glancing, most in the chest or belly. And, of course…” He tapped the edge of his empty eye socket. “This one is by far the ugliest, but I might have survived it on its own. With the others, I had no chance. At Jericho Hill, that was. Do you remember what I told you of that, Eddie?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, mouth dry. “You didn’t exactly say much, but yeah, I remember.”

“I don’t think you’ve ever told me,” said Susannah. “What was it?”

“A terrible battle. The three of us were the only survivors, although Alain could not properly be said to have participated, owing to the fact that he lay in what sorry concealment we could work up on an evening’s notice, dying of the wounds we put on him the night before.” The edge of his mouth stretched further, less a smile than a gash in his face, like he wanted to cut himself with it. “He came upon Roland and I by surprise, and we opened fire into the dark. We thought he would surely die before the morning, but he still hung on. We knew we would not survive the battle, and I came perilous close to putting a bullet in his head to spare him the slow death he’d have were we to never return. Lucky I didn’t, eh?”

“Lucky,” Eddie repeated. Susannah said nothing. She was very still against him, her breathing very quick and shallow. He got the idea maybe she was seeing something more vividly - though the guy’s words painted a horrible enough picture all on their own. “So what’s that got to do with this?”

Cuthbert gazed steadily at him, but it was clear that his focus was no longer on the present day. “I don’t know that it was his ability that kept him alive, kept his soul anchored to his damaged body, or simply luck, or - I cannot say. What I can say is that when the battle was done, Roland and I were thrown into a cart piled high with the corpses of our comrades, believed dead or close enough to that it didn’t matter. He awoke, and saw I was alive, and dragged me out from beneath the body of a friend and fellow gunslinger, and hauled me back to the camp where we had left Alain. I ought to have died. I was gutshot and drowning in my own blood, my own pierced bowels leaking poison out into my body, and faced a slow, agonizing death of infection and suffocation.”

“But he healed you,” Susannah said, sounding almost hypnotized, or like she was asleep. Distant, drowsy. 

“Yes,” Cuthbert said, nearly whispering. “He healed me. Half dead himself, lying in the heat all day without anyone to so much as drip water in his mouth from time to time, he put his hands on me and… I know not how to describe it. He made my body knit itself back together. He made my blood dump out the poison. It was ghastly painful. Given the choice between dying of a gut wound and being healed that same way again, why, I don’t know that I’d choose to live. It hurt that badly. And I was so cold for so long afterwards, and so hungry, as if perhaps he’d drained the life out of me to fix my wounds. But I woke up, and was able to tend to him and Roland, and we three managed to stagger on to live another day.”

Around them, the forest buzzed and hummed with insect life. A sighing, melancholy little breeze rattled at the leaves of the trees. The fire popped and crackled. Susannah’s heart beat against his side, and he could hear her breathing. 

She didn’t speak, though, and neither did Eddie. For once, he couldn’t think of anything to say. He was all too able to picture how that might have gone down, and he thought that the images Cuthbert’s words conjured up would probably show up in his nightmares for a good long while.

Eventually, Cuthbert went on. “But I said that it has its downsides. It costs him to do things like that. It can be likened to a muscle, which can become sore or even torn if overused. When he healed me - Roland told me this later, because I wasn’t present enough to know - he suffered a great fit afterwards. The effort of it nearly killed him twice over again.”

“A fit?” Susannah asked, sounding almost interested. “Like a seizure? Or a stroke?”

Cuthbert shrugged. “Roland tells me that he fell down and his whole body shook, and he remained unconscious for a long time. By the time I awoke, he would rouse for periods of time, and could eat and drink and be moved, but he was often disoriented. He had difficulty holding things or speaking for a long time. One of us had to feed him and dribble water into his mouth, or else he’d like to choke or drown himself.”

“Kinda sounds like both,” Eddie said. “Double brainfuck whammy.” He glanced over at Alain, like maybe he expected the guy to be fallen down in a swoon right then and there. He was still sitting up, still holding Roland’s head in his big blunt hands, both of them still so blank. There was a trickle of blood running from one of his nostrils, though, a dark line against his pale skin and beard.

“He recovered well from that, but ever since he has suffered from headaches and similar fits, though less severe, if he over-uses his touch.” Cuthbert glanced over that way too. His mouth became a thin, worried line. “He thinks I don’t notice. Mostly it isn’t an issue. But I tell you all this to say that if he could pull me from the very brink of death, and make my body heal itself, then if he could do so for Roland, he would. He cannot, and the effort that it takes him to put a temporary halt to Roland’s growing insanity is greater every time. We cannot simply rely on him to fix Roland whenever he descends once more into madness.”

“So, what,” Eddie said, “what do we do, then? Head back to the magic beach? You think, like, a few days before you woulda got to my door there’s one just hanging out there waiting that says THE BOY or something?”

Cuthbert shrugged again. “I know not. I doubt it. We must find a way to bring the boy through into our world, this we have already determined, but how we are to accomplish that, I confess, I do not know. I don’t pretend to have those answers. I simply need the two of you to understand where we stand.”

Apparently satisfied that they understood, he left without another word and went back around the fire to the other two. He knelt down in the dirt beside them, pulled some worn scrap of cloth from his pocket, and used it to tenderly wipe Alain’s bloody nose. Neither Alain nor Roland stirred.

Where they stood seemed, as far as Eddie could see, to be right on the corner of Fucked Avenue and Oh Shit Street.

\---

The next morning, Roland seemed no worse than he had over the last few days. If he recalled his dreams, or that Alain had gone into his mind once more, he said nothing of either. He went about his morning chores wrapped up in the same thoughtful silence that he always did, seeming not withdrawn but simply involved in some deep internal consideration. 

More unusual was Cuthbert. He wasn’t exactly quiet - Susannah thought that maybe if that man ever stopped talking, they’d really know they were in trouble - but he stayed in a tight orbit around Alain, talking and joking in a low voice with him as he got him up and helped him clean his face and groom his beard and eat breakfast.

The conversation they’d had last night had the quality, in her mind, of a dream. It was just a series of images - Roland’s bare feet below the cuffs of his battered jeans, one toe missing, toes curling as he hunched in on himself in his sleep; the firelight flickering on Cuthbert’s old scars so they danced and multiplied, a hundred hundred death-blows marching across his skinny torso; that single trickle of blood from Alain’s nose, so dark in the night against his pale skin and silvery beard - stitched through the ones she knew weren’t  _ real _ , the ones where she’d seen a pitilessly bright day, a hard blue sky, a horde of howling blue men running into a hail of gunfire until they overwhelmed the shooters and brought them down, the ones where she’d seen one dying man put his hands on another and push death out through the holes blown in him. Those could only have come from her own imagination. They hadn’t come from Cuthbert, she didn’t have that ability to reach into someone else’s mind and pull out images - but they’d seemed so real, so true. 

If she needed any evidence that it hadn’t been, she had all she could have asked for in Alain. He rose late and only at significant urging from Cuthbert, then sat there hunched over and squinting groggily into the late morning late. After a period of prodding and questioning, Cuthbert went and fetched a narrow vial from Alain’s pack and put it to his mouth, and after that he pepped up a bit.

His nose had bled again in the night, and Cuthbert had some trouble getting it all out of his beard since it’d dried, so that even when they left there was a bit of a pinkish streak there. His hands shook, so when he tried to comb and trim his own facial hair, he could not, and Cuthbert quickly took that over and did it for him as well. He was able to feed himself, at least, though slowly and with difficulty, and he only ate half the meager portion of last night’s left-over meat allotted to each of them.

And she was so absorbed in seeing that and in her own thoughts that she hardly responded at all to Eddie’s weak attempts at jollity. It was just that he needed reassuring, she knew, and she tried to give it to him, but there was so much else swirling around in her mind. What she’d seen in her own mind last night could not possibly be what she was sure it was, and yet she had seen it. What Cuthbert had described could not be  _ possible _ , and yet she believed him absolutely. 

In believing him, she also had to believe what he said about the severity of Roland’s condition. Sure, the man seemed fine right now, but it was - it was sort of like cancer, wasn’t it? A fellow could look completely fine on the outside while inside, something nasty burrowed through his guts and grew and multiplied, until he was riddled with it. Maybe he looked a little tired, a little peaky - Roland surely did - but then, he was also fifty-something and hiking through the wilderness trying to teach her and Eddie the lost lessons of his dead civilization on a quest that could generously be called impossible, and that wore a body out.

But she remembered last night. The anguish in his voice, the way he’d howled the boy’s name until he was hoarse, the way it broke out of his throat like a demon coming out of his very soul.

\---

Mostly in silence, they returned to the clearing where the great bear had made its den. During the day the place was less creepy, but there was still something in the air - some weight of years, perhaps, of purpose once known but long lost, of quiet tragedy. Susannah wanted to be gone from there as soon as possible, but evidently they had business.

All of them kept their distance from that strange metal structure which had ensorceled Eddie last night. Alain seemed initially drawn to it - even took a couple of shuffling steps towards it - but Cuthbert looped one arm through his and held him in place, and that was that.

“So is this one of those portals, then?” Eddie asked. “Where does it go?”

“I doubt anyone alive today knows that,” Roland answered. “I doubt anyone alive today even knows how to work it.”

“I bet old Tom could have figured it out,” said Cuthbert. 

“Who’s that? One of your old dead friends?” asked Eddie, with his usual tact.

Cuthbert, at least, did not seem offended. “Indeed. Sweet Tommy was not, truth be told, much good as a gunslinger, but he had quite a knack with machines. I wager if he were with us and we let him put his hands on yon device, within a day he’d have us going hither and thither about as magnificent a spread of alien dimensions as one could care to imagine.”

“Bet he could’ve built you guys a better bath, too,” Susannah muttered. “Maybe some real furniture.”

Cuthbert laughed, and even Alain cracked a rueful smile. “Say true,” Cuthbert cried, “had he been with us we would have been living in seaside glory! John Farson took more from us than he will ever know.”

“And if men had wings,” Roland put in, a touch impatiently, “we might fly over the miles to the Tower. But we have only our feet and ourselves, and here our journey begins. Where this portal might go is of no concern. What is of concern is that from here springs the Beam which will lead us to the Tower.”

“There’s the daily fun over with,” said Eddie under his breath.

“So, Roland,” Susannah asked, “I know you’ve talked about it a bit, but what  _ is _ a Beam? Other than something that leads to the Tower, I mean. What do they, you know, do?”

All three of the gunslingers looked at her. Roland frowned thoughtfully and rubbed at his cheek, while Alain glanced up towards the sky in that way he had of doing when he was thinking. It was Cuthbert who answered first, and he said, simply, “They do everything, my lady.”

“They hold,” said Roland slowly, as if trying out the words as he said them. “They bind. They keep things together.”

“Like magnetism?” Susannah asked. “Is that what you mean?”

“Yes!” Roland seized eagerly on that explanation, that bit of common ground between her understanding and his. “But not simply magnetism. Gravity, and space, and time, and all things. All aspects of how the world works. Dimension and size.”

“And the Tower,” she went on, “is it, what, some sort of generator? A power source?”

“That I cannot say.” Roland shrugged. 

“But you know this is the first step,” Eddie put in. “This is like, Point A. If we went on for long enough, we’d hit the other Beam at the other edge of the world, but first we’d hit the Tower in the middle. Right?” When Roland nodded, he asked, “So how long a trip is it?”

The gunslingers exchanged glances among themselves. Susannah didn’t like them, not at all. Those looks had the character of adults faced with a question from a child who won’t like or even be able to understand the answer they’re about to get, but who nonetheless they feel they have to respond to.

“We know it’s long,” Susannah put in. “Obviously the three of you have been journeying for some time.” Cuthbert snorted at that, and she had to give it to him: that was a hell of an understatement. From what she had gathered, they’d been at this since they were barely more than boys, and now they were old men. “And I guess you don’t know exactly where the thing is, or you would’ve already been there. But how long do you think?”

“A very long way,” Roland answered, “and getting longer by the day.”

“Roland,” Eddie said in the very reasonable tone of a man explaining to a child that there isn’t a monster under the bed because monsters aren’t real and, anyway, nothing could fit under there bigger than maybe a dog, “that can’t be. How can it get longer? The world doesn’t just grow.”

“Doesn’t it?” Roland responded with the implacable calm of a man who knew that however impossible the thing he might be asserting, he was absolutely correct. “Bert, hand me over your pack.” Cuthbert did so, and Roland went down on one knee and dug through it before coming up with a long leather case. This he opened up, and from within pulled out an elderly roll of parchment. With an almost reverential air, he unrolled it, and waved Eddie and Susannah over.

It was a map. They could not quite read the script on it, not all the way. To Susannah, it felt a bit like trying to read Cyrillic - many of the letters seemed the same, but others were wholly alien, and she had the idea that even the ones that looked like letters she knew might not make the same sound. Even without being able to read the names of any of the places, though, Susannah had an idea of what she was looking at. On one edge of the map there was a great expanse of wavy lines inked in blue, and running up to the north what could only be a forest.

“Our ka-mate Thomas copied this map from one in the library of Gilead,” Roland said. He pointed to a dot very far on the eastern edge of the map, his fingertip hovering above the surface of the parchment but not actually touching it. “Once, it was precious. Now I believe it may be a treasure of unmatched rarity in these waning days. This, here, is where Gilead stood. And the sea here is the Western Sea, from which we so recently came. The distance between them is great, as you can see - but it took us  _ twenty years _ to cross that distance.”

Susannah looked at the dot Roland indicated, then at the sea. There was a scale, though she couldn’t quite understand it. She didn’t need to in order to know that what Roland said was impossible. “Even if you walked, it couldn’t have taken that long.”

“Big guy can’t have slowed you guys up that much,” Eddie put in. 

“Well, you have to remember that we stopped from time to time to send letters home to our mothers, like good boys,” said Cuthbert. He wasn’t quite smiling, though. 

Susannah had an idea that it had been a long time since any of them had looked at that map, that maybe they’d preferred not to. Like waking up and knowing your alarm was about to go off, but imagining that if you didn’t look and see what time it was, the few minutes you had would feel longer. If they didn’t look at the distance, maybe it would go by quicker.

“We were on horseback most of the time,” Roland said, ignoring the both of them. “From time to time, yes, we were slowed up or diverted. At times we lingered. At others we went out of our way for one reason or another. But for most of that time, we headed west, away from John Farson.”

“Having destroyed our homeland and then murdered all of our friends,” Cuthbert said, coming over to take back custody of the map from Roland, “he could not in good conscience rest until he had all three of our heads on spikes in his courtyard. I suppose it must rankle him something awful that he never managed to quite snuff us out, assuming the old monster is still alive.”

“We once took something very precious from him as well,” added Roland. “Though that is a story for another time. The point is that this whole world  _ is _ growing. Everything is falling apart. You have seen it, both of you! How long is a day, now? Which way does the sun rise or set? For your fathers’ sakes, look at these sorry machines!”

He snatched one up off the ground. It looked like a mechanical snake, long and segmented. It drooped sadly to either side of Roland’s hand, lifeless and dull. He tossed it at Eddie, and when it hit the ground at Eddie’s feet it split in half. Craning her head, Susannah saw that inside it was greasy and mildewed and full of rust.

Roland snatched up another machine and began to pull metal pieces off of it with his bare fingers, as easy as if he were taking apart a child’s toy. “Everything is tired. Worn out. Decaying. The world slows down and speeds up, both at once, and the very forces which govern reality, forces that to the two of you seem inviolable, begin to falter and stretch. It had begun to happen already when we were boys, but even then we couldn’t imagine what the end times would truly look like. Now we live in them, and I don’t believe it’s just our own world that’s affected. You asked if the Tower was a generator for the Beams, Susannah, and I said I did not know. I do not. I do know this, though: the Beams hold up the Tower the same as they hold the forces of the world together, and they are failing. And when they fail - not if, Susannah and Eddie of New York, but  _ when _ , if nothing is done - the Tower will fall, and it will take not just this world but every single world in existence with it. Do you kennit?”

“So you see,” Cuthbert said into the silence that followed, “we are ambitious fellows. We don’t simply wish to view the greatest wonder of any world that ever was or will be. We wish to save them all into the bargain, and repair the very bindings of reality itself. Are you not pleased to be brought along?”

“And just how do you plan to do that?” Eddie asked. “Like what’s the scheme, here? You gotta let us in on that.”

Roland shrugged again, seeming not unconcerned so much as beatifically secure in his conviction that all would go as it must. “That is ka. Our concern is simply getting there.”

“You - I’m sorry, you don’t have a  _ plan _ ?” Eddie asked incredulously. “Your whole idea for how to save all of existence is that you’ll burn that bridge when you get to it, is that right?”

Cuthbert clapped him on the back. “That’s about the size of it,” he admitted cheerfully, “but take heart and do not fret, Eddie! We’re very good at improvising.”

“Jesus  _ Christ. _ ”

Susannah couldn’t in good conscience say that didn’t worry her, but she had a bit of a more prosaic concern: “How are we going to keep to a straight-line course to follow this sucker? Doesn’t look like there’s exactly a path.”

It was Alain - who had barely spoken two words all morning - who answered. “Oh, but there is.” He spoke slowly and sounded dazed, but he did speak. He took hold of the handles of her chair and maneuvered her to a point directly in front of the painted metal box, though still a good distance away. “Look, now,” he said softly. “Not at any one thing. At everything. Do you see it?”

She didn’t… and then, suddenly, she did. It was the same way he’d taught her to look for trail, not by finding any one sign of passage but by seeing the whole of the area and then looking for anything different, anything out of place, anything disturbed. There wasn’t anything so obvious as a path, no, but when she really looked, she saw that everything in front of her pointed in the direction of the Beam.

The branches of the trees leaned that way. When the wind came rustling through, the leaves in that particular corridor blew in one direction, while the others did not. The arrangement of scrub and grass on the forest floor outlined the suggestion of some great path, as if perhaps there had once been a road there which had simply been overgrown and buried. When she looked up, even the clouds that came into that path moved differently. Even the  _ shadows  _ \- there was a sort of herringbone pattern to the lay of the shadow and light in the path of the Beam.

“I can feel it as well,” Alain said. “I would known a moment if we stepped off of it. I suspect that perhaps you would swell.”

_ Where is it you wander?  _ he had asked her, just yesterday, standing on the outer edge of this very clearing. And much earlier, sitting in the cave he and Cuthbert had made their home for so long:  _ Like a crack in the wall of a cave through which one can hear the distant trickle of dark water…  _ How deep might that water be? Where, indeed, did it take her when she found herself drifting on its currents? The visions she’d had last night as Cuthbert spoke of how narrowly they’d escaped that old battle weighed heavily on her mind. Some of it might have been her imagination, even most of it, but there had been so many parts of it she’d imagined so vividly which he hadn’t said anything about one way or the other.

And didn’t she feel something? Sitting there, looking at the subtle way the entire world bowed forward in one direction, like a great arrow pointing the way to the distant Tower, did she not feel some sense of power, of purpose? Did it not crawl and tingle beneath her skin, in her blood, in her bones, in the fluid of her eyes and ears?

She did. It did.

“Gods above,” said Cuthbert, “we truly have found it. I cry your pardon, Roland, but I don’t know as I ever truly believed we would.”

Dryly, Roland said, “You have my pardon. And proof, now, that my quest is not simply madness. I am relieved as well. We might have wandered the rest of our span of days and never come across this, but now the way has been opened.”

Somehow, Susannah didn’t think that was entirely true. She had an idea that this place, this Beam, this chance, would always be waiting for Roland. Whether he got here with the four of them or all on his lonesome, whether it took him twenty or forty or a hundred years, she thought that it would wait for him until he arrived.

“Water if God wills it!” Cuthbert almost shouted, his voice rising jubilantly in the odd, humming air of the clearing. A manic sort of energy rose in him, animating him suddenly. He grabbed Roland and drew him into a kiss, then let him go and practically danced across the space to Alain, and did the same. 

Head craned to watch it happen right above her, Susannah was fairly certain he slipped the big guy a bit of tongue. Then he came whirling around and swooped down to take her face in his long, narrow hands, and kissed her as well. No tongue, thankfully, just a hard press of his dry lips on hers. She could almost feel him vibrating with renewed purpose. She couldn’t blame him, not at all. A lifetime spent in search of something that not even the man he followed knew how to find, and now they’d found the way. It must have been sinking in all last night and the morning too that they’d  _ found _ it, they were  _ there _ .

Cuthbert let her go as quickly as he’d descended on her and made his way over to Eddie, who put his hands up. “I’m not really into kissing guys,” Eddie said, even as Cuthbert reached for him.

“Eddie,” said Cuthbert, in a tone of fond exasperation, “I am not asking you to come have a fuck in the bushes. Thirty years I’ve searched for this damned Tower, and now, finally, the first step we take out of this wretched clearing will be the first step any of us have truly taken  _ towards  _ it.”

Eddie turned his cheek, smiling a sort of helpless guy’s-gotta-do-what-a-guy’s-gotta-do smile, and allowed Cuthbert to grab and kiss him on the proffered cheek.

“Now,” said Cuthbert, still brimming over with that infectious energy - Susannah felt the wild leaping joy of it herself, and above her Alain seemed livelier than he had in the last couple of days, and even Roland was smiling - “let us away from this dreadful fucking place.”


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A ceremony. Roland learns something he might have rather not known. A brief mention of past incestuous abuse at the end here.

That night, Susannah intended to ask Cuthbert about the visions she’d had. Away from the unnatural clearing where the bear had denned, on their way once more, she had half talked herself into believing that he would laugh and tell her that she had imagined it all quite wrong, and that would be that. 

When they stopped, though, Roland stayed only long enough to lay out the ingredients for dinner, then whisked the other two away. Susannah laid the fire and put dinner on, perhaps not with the grace and efficiency that any of the gunslingers would have done, but well enough. They took turns, and usually shared the labor out between them, but as soon as they’d come to a halt, Eddie had pulled out the chunk of ash he’d carved off a tree and gone to work on it, with such an air of concentration she didn’t wish to disturb him.

Fire laid and dinner made, there was nothing for her to do but sit and watch him. The cocoon of silent focus wrapped around him in such a way as to entirely discourage idle chitchat, but she didn’t mind. This was a side of Eddie she didn’t see often: focused, absorbed in a task, bent wholly towards some act of creation. 

It was vulnerable, and powerful, and in that moment she didn’t just like him - didn’t just desire him - but  _ loved _ him, loved the shelf of his brow and the straight line of his nose and his narrow lips and pointed chin and his hands, his clever steady hands, and the mind behind that face which was capable of such a range of emotion and action. 

She ate. Though she was loathe to interrupt Eddie, she urged him to eat too, and then quietly tended to cleaning up their dishes while he went right back to what he was doing. Eventually, she grew weary and laid herself down next to him and slept.

In the morning, the three gunslingers presented her and Eddie with an idea so surprising that it put all thoughts of her ‘visions’ from her mind.

\---

They had all three been through the ceremony themselves, and witnessed those of their peers who had made it to the end of their apprenticeships go through it as well. Circumstances necessitated some changes from the ancient ritual, but the inner core of it remained the same. That was what Roland felt important about it, anyway. In the same way that a gunslinger was ritual wrapped around a bundle of dead-simple killer’s instincts, so was the pageantry of this ritual simply set-dressing for the purpose.

There was no church nor ancient hall to pass the night-long vigil in, so instead he had Eddie and Susannah spend a night placed at separate corners of the camp, far enough to feel alone but near enough that they would not be in any danger from nighttime beasts. He had spent his evening in a simple linen shift, clothed enough to be decent but bare of all pretension, and walked barefoot to Cort’s hut to be formally graduated. Linen they did not have. Their clothes were simple enough as it was, and he wasn’t about to make Eddie walk barefoot through the forest and risk him hurting himself in a way that might lame him up. (For Susannah, of course, it was not a concern either way.)

To earn the right to one’s father’s guns, specifically, was its own ritual. Many boys were passed the guns of their grandfathers or uncles or cousins. Many boys were given guns from men who had died without issue, or whose sons had not been fit to graduate gunslinger training. There was different verbiage in each case. Ultimately, it came down to the same thing.

Roland had been granted permission to bear his father’s guns in Gilead’s great hall, before all the assembled nobility. Eddie and Susannah were given the guns which they would bear until their deaths in a nameless forest on the edge of the world, watched over by each other, by the last three living sons of Gilead, and by the trees.

And on the path of the Beam. That more than anything made it right. Gilead had been an anchor for a Beam, and here in this forest they had found another, and it was there that gunslingers would once more be annointed into the world.

In the light of the rising sun, they began.

“Susannah Holmes, daughter of Dan,” Roland intoned, standing before her, “today you have proven yourself worthy of the title of gunslinger.” Not wholly true. Under the same tutelage as Roland had received, they would have yet been ‘prentices, though promising ones likely to graduate to novices soon enough. Here and now, they needed guns, and he was not going to pass the ancient machines of Sir Arthur Eld’s first knights onto folk who had not been named gunslinger. “You have earned your guns, and in so doing, you have taken your place among a proud lineage stretching back to the days of Arthur Eld himself. Say your lesson, and say true.”

He spoke in the High Speech. Susannah and Eddie understood the low speech, but he would not profane the heart of this ritual by speaking it so. The two of them had been coached on what would be said, and what responses were expected.

“I do not aim with my hand,” Susannah said, in the language of her Earth, which was so like and yet so unlike the low speech Roland had grown up with. “She who aims with her hand has forgotten the face of her father. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand. She who shoots with her hand has forgotten the face of her father. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun. She who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her father. I kill with my heart.”

Roland nodded. She spoke well, with solemnity. 

“To you I pass on the gun of Roland Deschain, son of Steven, son of Alaric, son of Arthur, son of Desmond…” For this ceremony, he named the lineage of his fathers back all the way to the gilly who had birthed the first heir of the line of Deschain. It was important that she bore not only the gun but the weight of the gun’s history. She was part of that line as well, now. “Once this machine was borne by the hands of Arthur Eld himself, who knit together the Affiliation of Baronies out of the chaos of war and misery nigh on a thousand years ago. Now your hands will  rest where his hands rested, and his spirit is with you, as is the spirit of all of my fathers who bore it before me. Does anyone here object to the passage of this gun onto this woman?”

That part was more a formality than any of the rest of it. He still looked around and met Cuthbert’s eyes as well as Alain’s. Neither of them would object, but it was important that they both be given the chance to. Cuthbert especially, for in the normal course of events, the guns of Deschain would pass onto him were Roland to fall first.

One after the other, they registered that they did not object, and thought her worthy.

Roland stepped forward and sank to one knee before her, holding out the gun. He did not present it handle first, as he usually would, but rather held out flat in both hands, as if in offering. “Then bear it well, Susannah daughter of Dan. Bear it with honor, and use it with honor, so that when you fall, your spirit may join the lineage of my fathers.”

She took the gun and holstered it. The holster, too, had once been Roland’s. Now, after having been carefully altered, it hung cross-ways across Susannah’s chest. 

“I will bear it with honor,” she said, “and remember the face of my father and of all the fathers who bore it before. This I do swear.”

She bowed her head, showing him her neck. He took her face in his hands and pressed a dry kiss to the crown of her head. “Then rise,” he said, although she couldn’t, “and stand among us a gunslinger and an equal.”

At the least, she could and did straighten up, pride obvious in the line of her back and the set of her shoulders. Roland had always hoped to have a son to whom he could pass his guns, but he had long ago given up that hope, and he found himself now well satisfied. She had proven herself not once but several times, and taken quickly to their lessons. She had a good eye, fast hands, and a killer’s nature beneath the softness of her civilized exterior. At the same time, she possessed the swiftness of mind and grace of bearing to perform the other tasks to which a gunslinger was often set. She would not struggle to put folk at their ease, nor to hear a grievance and pass a fair judgment.

Roland rose and stepped back. In the normal course of events, the one passing on the family guns would remain kneeling while the new gunslinger stood above him, until all had been given their weapons. In the normal course of events, though, the one who announced each apprentice’s graduation was not the one who handed over the guns. That was the man who had borne them, or the nearest suitable relative, and in the absence of such a relative they had a man whose job it was.

His own graduation had not been traditional either. His father had not been present, and Cort in no shape to preside over a ceremony. Only after he and his ka-mates had returned from Mejis had the ceremony taken place. His father had formally granted him the right to the guns of Deschain at a feast, and a week later the ceremony had taken place, half inside the great hall and then half kneeling on the wooden floor of Cort’s hut by his bedside to receive his permission and his kiss and to be told by that once-great man to rise and stand before him a gunslinger.

Here, Roland acted as both dinh presiding over the ceremony and the one who was responsible for passing the gun on to Susannah, and so he could not remain before her as tradition suggested.

With Eddie, at least, he had only to officiate. He led Eddie through the call-and-response, and the recitation of his lesson, pleased that he was as solemn as Susannah. Such a personality as Eddie’s often took refuge in the ridiculous during moments of high emotion. Roland could remember well how he’d expected Cuthbert to work some mischief or make some smart comment during his own ceremony. Eddie now, as Cuthbert had then, did no such thing.

It was Alain who stepped forward and went down - slowly and ponderously, with great effort - onto one knee, his bad leg stretched stiffly to the side. No doubt holding such a position hurt him, but the strain showed only in the over-careful movement of his body, and not at all on his face or in his voice.

“Hey, man,” Eddie said softly, glancing with obvious worry between Alain and Roland, “you don’t gotta -”

“Hush,” Alain murmured back in the low speech, without heat. “You were doing sole. Mind it not and pay attention.” He held out the gun which hung normally on his left hip, heavy and dark and worn smooth from years of use. It was of slightly more use to him than Roland’s, given that he had a perfectly functioning hand and arm with which to bear it, but that hand also typically held the staff he walked with, and that staff made a potent weapon of its own. 

In the High Speech, he went on, for this part at least was his: “To you I pass on the gun of Alain Johns, son of Christopher, son of Luc, son of Jean -” and back on through the years - “descendants of the line of Sir Alfred Johns, knight and gunslinger to Arthur Eld, who fought at his side and sat on his councils and died in his defense. Now your hands will rest where his once rested, and his spirit will be with you, as will the spirits of all my fathers who bore it before me.”

As with Susannah, none of them had any objection. The gun passed from Alain’s hands - trembling just slightly, though they all pretended they did not see - into Eddie’s. Alain kissed the top of his head and told him to bear it with honor, and then Roland bid him rise as a man and gunslinger, and stand with them as equals.

“I welcome you both as gunslingers. I share ka and khef, and invite you to share with me.” He embraced them each, as did Cuthbert. And then it was over.

Eddie held his hand out to Alain, who took it gladly and allowed himself to be helped to his feet. The only outward sign of the effort it took him to stay kneeling and then rise was the sweat beading on his forehead - and that could be attributed well enough to the growing heat of the day. Shaded beneath the trees of the forest it wasn’t so bad, but summer was in full swing, and each day the air quickly became hot and close. The further they traveled from the sea, the stickier and stiller the summer air got.

Following the ceremony was, of course, the feast. Susannah and Eddie had fasted the day before. Cuthbert and Roland had gone out to hunt, each killing double, and then the two of them along with Alain had spent most of that day and night skinning, gutting, draining, and cooking up the best meal they could under the circumstances. 

Each of the two of them was given a good-sized bird, stuffed and rubbed with herbs and roasted on a spit until it was crisp and brown and crackling. Alain had overseen a hearty stew, a meal which well suited his practical nature. Cuthbert had found a patch of berries and cooked them up wrapped in fragrant leaves along with a good handful of the pine nuts they’d brought along from his and Alain’s stores. To drink there was only water, which was a shame, but it was cool and clear and fresh.

“So,” Eddie asked around a mouthful of birdflesh, “is it like, some kind of scandal to give your guns to someone who isn’t your son?”

“It’s not ideal, for surely every man wishes to have a son to bear his name, and men who bear the guns more than most,” said Cuthbert, “but it does happen. ‘Tis a dangerous life we lead, and accidents do occur, oftimes quite inconveniently before one has had a chance to sow one’s wild oats, much less do any proper gardening. There were plenty of guns in Gilead that had no bearer.”

“Yeah? So how do you decide who gets which ones, then?”

Cuthbert shrugged. “Ideally it would be the closest suitable male relative. Was a time my parents thought my father’s guns would go to Roland, for instance, for his mother and I share the Allgood grandfather. Should Susannah and Roland both pre-decease me, those guns will come to me, though what I’d do with four of them I haven’t the faintest clue.”

“And if there aren’t any handy cousins hanging around?” Susannah asked. “What then?”

“Well, then we’d have someone go digging about in the genealogies to see if any family connection could be established. We’re all a bit inbred, you know. Except for Alain, his mother was a woman of the Manni tribes. Why someone should throw over their people and risk eternal damnation for the sake of Chris Johns, I couldn’t say, but -”

“Bert,” said Alain mildly. 

Cuthbert shrugged again, more elaborately. “At any rate, there’d often be some shared relative a few generations back. Or sometimes there would be family guns that had skipped a generation. Jamie DeCurry, for instance - he bore the DeCurry guns, though they hadn’t been his father’s. His father was the castle doctor. It was his great-uncle who’d been the last gunslinger in the DeCurry family. Like as not he wouldn’t have touched hand to them if they  _ had _ been his father’s, though -” All at once, quite unaccountably, Cuthbert shut himself up.

Eddie and Susannah exchanged a glance, and then Eddie asked, very casually, “Daddy issues, huh?”

“They didn’t get along well, no,” said Cuthbert carefully. “Jamie was put in care of my father when he was, oh, eleven or so, though it was the doctor who passed him on the guns at the ceremony.” His voice was very cautious, though it didn’t seem to be for fear of telling their new companions anything he oughtn’t - it was Roland he looked at, just a brief dart of his dark eye, as if gauging how well he was listening.

Which was quite curious. Roland had known that about Jamie, of course. Everyone in their class had known, though no one had ever quite known why. He’d ventured to ask his own father, once - for his own unimaginative mind simply could not conjure a reason to take a man’s son away, and he’d been gripped with a vague fear it had been perhaps punishment for some misbehavior on Jamie’s part, and that it could therefore happen to him as well - but been curtly told to mind his own business, and when afterwards he’d asked Cuthbert, Cuthbert had professed not to know either. 

“Wow,” said Eddie. “Sounds like you’d have to try pretty hard to get your kids taken away back in ye olden times. Guy must’ve been a real piece of work.”

“He was a monster,” Alain put in, with some force. 

Roland raised his eyebrows. Though Cuthbert had been something of a brother to Jamie, Alain had ever been closer to him. It was not like him to speak so of any of their dead friends’ fathers, though. 

He had a sense that there was a secret here, known by both of his ka-mates but not him. It rubbed him rough, it surely did. During life, Jamie DeCurry had served Roland as dinh. It was not in Roland’s nature to disallow those in his tet from their own secrets, so long as those secrets did not bear on either the sanctity of the tet nor their quest, but it galled him now that Cuthbert and Alain seemed determined to keep this secret long after it could have mattered. It felt, once more, as if they shared something between them which he was wholly apart from, which neither included nor thought of him.

“Let us not speak of the unhappy past,” Roland suggested. “Today should be a day of celebration for you two.”

“Yes,” said Cuthbert, jumping eagerly on Roland’s words. “Let us all eat and drink and be merry! The past is full of ghosts and the future full of death, but here and now we have good food and fine companions.”

And later that evening, perhaps, Roland could put the question to Cuthbert about the ghost that he and Alain seemed to be holding in confidence between them.

Not long into the night, he got his chance. Eddie and Susannah, tired from standing vigil the night before and full of hot food, fell asleep quickly. The distance which Alain and Bert had kept between themselves immediately closed. Roland recognized intent in the way Bert leaned into Alain’s body, the way he trailed his fingers up and down Alain’s chest, and felt a pang at the thought of interrupting them. Quite a large part of him wanted, instead, to join them, and take what comfort he could from the closeness of their bodies.

Instead he went and stood over them. “Alain. Cuthbert. I would speak with the two of you.”

Cuthbert tilted his head, birdlike, to peer at Roland with his single eye. “You pick an opportune time to do so, my friend.”

Roland crouched down beside them, hands hanging between his knees. “You are keeping some secret from me. I wish to know it.”

The two of them glanced at each other. Cuthbert sat up straight, though he was still near enough Alain that their shoulders touched. “Cry pardon, Roland, but I do not know -”

“He’s speaking of Jamie,” Alain interrupted. He met Roland’s eyes squarely. There was no guilt in his gaze, no hint that he held some secret back from Roland. “He feels we have been seeping key - keeping secrets. ‘Tis not so, Roland. Jamie shared things with us in confidence, is all, and it has never been needful that you know.”

Jamie DeCurry was decades in the ground, and had never been one of Roland’s close friends. Yet he had been ka-tet. He had been part of that small group of survivors of long lost Gilead. It stung unexpectedly to hear that he had shared confidence with the others but not Roland. 

Of course it was only natural that they would speak among themselves, and yet he couldn’t help but wonder what else might have been shared between the members of his ka-tet and then kept from him, and at whose decision. “And who judged that it wasn’t needful?”

“His father fucked him, Roland,” Cuthbert said, biting off each word with crisp irritation. No mincing, no fooling, just the truth, plain and bare. “That is what he shared with us but did not wish you to know. It shamed him to have been so used. Thomas knew long before the two of us did, I am sure, and he was compelled to tell me and Alain when some memory of it got stuck rattling around in Alain’s mind. He didn’t wish to, nor did he tell us more than he felt he had to, and he didn’t want you to know because he feared losing your respect.”

Roland knew, of course, that such things happened. And he had known, of course, that Dr. DeCurry must have done something truly vile to have his son removed from his custody. Still, hearing it so bluntly stated shocked him, which had no doubt been Cuthbert’s intent.

“I would never have respected him less for such,” Roland said quietly. “Did he truly think so of me?”

“What does it matter now?” asked Cuthbert. “He’s dead. I never thought it my place to pressure him to tell you something so painful. No doubt he’d have preferred we all go to our graves never knowing. Say true, I’d rather remember him by other means. Why does it press you so?”

Roland could not say. He did not feel any particular triumph having wrested this fact from Cuthbert. Mostly he felt old, and tired, and sad. He sat on the ground beside the two of them, legs stretched out before him, and said nothing. In having discovered such a thing of his long dead friend, he couldn’t help but wonder, now, just how well he truly knew the two men sitting beside him. Ten years he’d been gone - ten years which for him seemed like the blink of an eye, or a long night’s palaver, but which they had spent every moment of together. How distant they now were from him!

“It isn’t that he didn’t trust you,” Alain said after a moment. He reached around Cuthbert to rest one large, warm hand on Roland’s shoulder. “It was simply so painful for him. The things that man did… I saw his dreams at times, though I never meant to. So much of his life was marked by that shadow that I do believe he just wanted one part which wasn’t.”

Whether it was true or a kindly meant lie, Roland appreciated it all the same. He leaned into that touch, into the solidity of Cuthbert between the two of them. Having heard that old secret, so closely held - and yet so pointlessly held, for they three were the only ones alive to whom it meant anything - he had no desire for the physical comfort he’d thought to seek earlier. It seemed that Cuthbert and Alain no longer wished to take advantage of the time in that way, either.

They sat that way for a long time, looking and thinking upon the newest gunslingers among them, thinking too of the old friends they had lost. When they slept, eventually, they all three slept close. Roland had hoped in some part of his mind that their presence would ease his sleep, but it was as troubled as it had been these last few weeks.


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eddie learns a thing.
> 
> NOTE: we have four more chapters of this installment left, up to the drawing of Jake. Beyond that, I have a bit written, but nothing ready to be posted. I've been working busily on NaNo this year, and also working a retail job which gets extremely busy around this time of year, so I haven't had time or energy to devote to this fic. It is not abandoned, but it might be some time before you see new updates beyond what I've already written!

When Alain went to stand and go to Roland, Cuthbert did not continue arguing his point. He simply grabbed his wrist and pulled him off balance, so that he sat down hard on the ground.

It wasn’t any great distance, but the impact still jarred his bad right leg, which ached and throbbed like a rotten tooth, hot and swollen as if it might at any moment burst open. Alain swallowed a curse, and turned angrily on Cuthbert. It took a lot to rouse his temper, but the constant wearing pain made it easier than perhaps it once had been, and he felt a sort of hurt bewilderment that Cuthbert, of all people, would do something to deliberately make his pain worse.

“Bert,” he hissed, impatiently, “he’s -”

“Not going to die tonight,” Cuthbert interrupted. His grip on Alain’s wrist was just short of painful. “You said yourself you ought to wait at least a week before you try to touch him again like that. It’s been four days.”

It would not be easy to break free of Cuthbert’s grip, but it would be possible. Alain had ever been physically stronger. Of late, though, his body had become unreliable. His hands shook and would not hold things. Words slurred or switched themselves around in his mouth. It was not hard to draw him off balance, but Bert had been able to do it more easily than he liked to admit.

So he sat where he was and tried to use reason. “That - that’s was - I only  _ guess _ , Bert -” He bit off the flow of words, frustrated. They tripped so grudgingly off his tongue now, and came with difficulty. It only proved Bert’s point. “You don’t know. You don’t - touch-blind. You don’t see.”

“I may be touch-blind, but I’m not  _ blind _ blind. I can see how badly off he is. I know him every bit as well as you do, Alain, and do you doubt that I love him?” Bert stared intently into Alain’s eyes, leaning in very close. He was trying to whisper, trying not to wake the other two, nor attract Roland’s attention. “You had a fit, Alain, and when you woke you thought Eddie was Thomas and kept asking for your sister. For an  _ hour _ . Your nose bled all through the night, and your eyes as well. They’re still a bit red. You can’t talk, man, for half your words switch places in your mouth when you speak them! What good is it going to do any of us if this time you have a brainstorm and die, or end up paralyzed?”

“What good us it going to do is if  _ Roland _ dies?” 

“If I thought that you destroying your own mind and body would truly help him, Alain, I would let you.” Cuthbert said that with the fervency of true belief, though Alain wasn’t sure if he believed it himself. Once, perhaps, it might have been true, but he sensed just as well as Roland did that some quiet sea change had occurred during the last ten years away. “At most, though, it will buy him a day of half-hearted peace, and perhaps at the cost of you ever being able to do anything for any of us again.”

Alain knew that he was right. At the same time, how was he supposed to sit by and watch his dinh suffer so, and not even offer to help?

The misery on his face and in his heart had to be palpable. Cuthbert shuffled in closer and released his wrist to put his arms around him, and drew Alain’s head against his chest. “I’m terrified for him,” he whispered into the top of Alain’s head. “I don’t know that we can fix this. I’ve no idea how to find this damned boy. I could not possibly endure losing the both of you, though.”

“I can lust  _ leave _ him like that,” said Alain wretchedly.

“Three days, Alain. Give yourself time to heal. Two, maybe, if he seems truly unable to bear it. He bore it for weeks before you stepped in, did he not?”

A pointless argument to make. They both knew it was getting worse. Alain suspected that it was the influence of the Beam which made it so. The closer they came to their goal, the longer they spent within that immense power, the thinner the fabric was between their world and the boy’s world, and the more it wore on poor Roland.

_ \- the key,  _ came the barest ghost of a whisper. Alain started, and looked around. It had not been a voice he knew.  _ It makes the voices stop. _

Cuthbert did not seem to have noticed. At the other end of camp, Roland reacted no more than he had to the half-whispered argument between his two oldest ka-mates. Eddie, though, stirred and then sat up. Slowly, with the air of a man still half-asleep, he drew the key he had been carving from his pack and shuffled over to Roland with it.

Roland barely reacted until Eddie was right behind him. Seeing that made Alain sick, right down to the very pit of his gut. There was no clearer evidence that this division would eat Roland down to nothing and then kill him than how dull it made him, to Alain’s thinking.

He felt the difference himself, though, as soon as Eddie handed Roland the key. A great and oppressive weight lifted. It was if he had stood within a roaring waterfall, buffeted by waves of sound so loud they slapped at him with bruising force, and just as he began to think that the noise he heard was simply how silence sounded - for he could surely hear nothing else - it cut off.

At the same time, Roland leapt to his feet and shouted to the skies: “ _ The voices are gone!” _

\---

Once more, Alain walked the alien streets of a strange world. This part, he believed, was of a poorer class than the part he had seen previously. It bore little resemblance to the slums of the low town with which he had been familiar; there, folk had lived atop each other in narrow warrens of wooden shanties, with streets barely large enough to admit a single man walking, much less a horse or mule or cart. Here folk lived in unimaginably huge buildings which rose towering up to touch the sky, floor upon floor upon floor of stone and brick and glass.

But there were signs he recognized, as well. There was little of art here, little of nature. Many of the glass windows were broken and boarded over, or else covered with some flimsy material which flapped in the wind. Things looked worn down and tired. The air had not been clean in the more affluent part of this city, but here it reeked of nightsoil and garbage along with the strange chemicals for which Alain had no name - although they put him in mind of a night very distant, when he and his two ka-mates had struck a blow against the forces of the Good Man and sent a whole row of oil tankers up in flames.

As he walked down the street, drawn by what he was coming more and more to believe was the hand of ka, nature slowly asserted itself. The weeds which sprung from the cracks in the paved stone walkway and grew in the littered, empty lots grew taller. Trees began to appear, growing through the empty window-frames and doorframes. Soon the trees began to erupt through the stone of the walkway itself, so that it buckled and cracked and fell in chunks around their grasping roots.

He walked from that alien city into a forest which he recognized well, for was his body not, at that very moment, sleeping beneath its canopy?

Shortly the forest became a ruin of downed trees and ugly scrub. This he went through with much greater ease than he had while awake, for in dreams his body was more whole. It was not his dream, but he was still able to control how he himself appeared, at least, and he did not choose to struggle and hurt asleep as well as awake.

Soon enough he came to the thin barrier of living alders, and then went past them. In the clearing there was more of that strange material from which the streets of the other world’s city were made. He stepped onto it and noted that, in the heat of the day - great walloping humid heat, for it seemed that in that city it was still coming on summer, while in their own world summer was starting to bleed into autumn - whatever material it was became spongy, springy, and almost sticky. It smelled pungently, too, a smell that reminded him once more of those burning oil tankers. What a reek that had been! He’d been able to smell nothing else for days.

There were marks painted on it in faded yellow. Standing in the middle of it was a young man, a man who without having to ask, Alain knew was Eddie. He held a ball in his hands, and as Alain watched, took several steps back and then tossed it overhand through a hoop which was now affixed to the metal structure from which the Beam emanated.

“Hile, Eddie,” he said.

Eddie turned and looked at him, surprised. The ball went rolling away and off the edge of the black surface, into the bone-dusty dirt of the clearing. “What’re you here for? You’re not Jake. You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I’m not sure.” Alain stepped off the edge of the black surface and picked the ball back up. It had a pleasantly rough, pebbled surface. “But I have an idea. I suspect he is reaching out through you from his own world, and in reaching out has found me. My mind is surely most open of all of ours. Do you remember seeing me in your other dreams?”

Perhaps upon waking, Eddie would. This manifestation of him did not. He simply shrugged, then held out his hands for the ball. “You look like more of a wrestler type to me, but you wanna play some hoops ‘til the kid gets here?”

Alain tossed the ball back. Eddie caught it, pegged it once more through the hoop, then caught it as it bounced back and threw it over to Alain.

Apprentice gunslingers had precious little time for anything that wasn’t that training. Part of it included physical fitness - they wrestled, fought, and practiced with various close combat weapons - but sports were a luxury. Alain found a simple pleasure in picking up the rules of this game from Eddie’s world. Eddie was more nimble than he was, but he had the better aim, and by Eddie’s reckoning of points, he was ahead when the trees began to rustle and the boy emerged.

Alain had never seen him, but he had  _ been _ him, and he knew him instantly. Jake Chambers stood before them dressed very neat, as if perhaps for a formal occasion. He was very young and small for his age, tow-headed and blue-eyed, but Alain could see something he suspected Eddie could not: that around the boy’s body blazed a powerful aura. He had the touch, this boy did, and more than simply a touch of it. 

_ Why,  _ Alain thought with a sudden fierce delight,  _ he’s stronger in it untrained than I am now at the end of my life!  _

Eddie’s presence seemed in some way to facilitate it, to provide a door through which Jake could peer in it at them, but it had to take prodigious strength and skill simply for the boy to be able to reach across the barriers of reality itself - and what was more, Alain did not believe he knew he was doing it, or knew how to guide it.

“Don’t step on any of the robots,” Eddie said. “Pretty sure they’re all dead, but I wouldn’t take any chances.”

“Are you me?” Jake asked, as he cautiously made his way over to the paved surface on which they stood. He looked at Alain, frowning, and Alain caught the lay of his thoughts - that perhaps Eddie was him as he was right then, one of his divided halves, and perhaps Alain was him as he might one day be. There was not overly much resemblance between them; Alain’s hair had at its darkest been a bright and buttery yellow, while this boy’s had more of a hint of brown to it, and where the boy was slim and small, Alain had always been stocky. 

Even less was the resemblance between the boy Jake and this young version of Eddie, who was dark-haired and hazel-eyed, fox-faced where Jake had signs that he would grow into a fine square jaw and face.

“No,” Jake answered himself a moment later. “Sorry. I guess I’ve just been cut in two lately, so it’s been pretty weird for me. Who are you?”

“Been a real bitch for you, hasn’t it?” Eddie said, and tossed the ball through the hoop. It came bouncing right back to him and he passed it to Jake. “Doesn’t really matter. Big guy here is just sight-seeing, I think, and as for me, I’m just here to tell you where you need to go. It’s gonna get better, but it’s gonna get worse first. You gotta take your medicine.”

“Where do I have to go? Where  _ are _ we?” Jake made a shot as well. It landed squarely in the hoop, though he didn’t have the same grace of motion as young Eddie did. 

“Right here you got yourself a classic mind merger,” Eddie said, “between the Portal of the Bear, may he rest in pieces, and good old Brooklyn. But that’s not really important. Br’er Bear’s old news for us, and for you too. You just gotta come find me, alright? Just find me and follow us, but make sure Henry doesn’t see you. Strangers make him nervous and he gets kinda mean when he’s nervous, and he’s bigger than you.”

“Who’s Henry?” The strangeness of the scene was beginning to wear on Jake. He looked around with frightened, darting eyes. “How am I supposed to find you? I don’t even know you.”

“Easy-peasy. Just come to Co-Op City, you’ll see me.” Message delivered, the shade of Eddie’s younger self began to fade.

Jake started forward, reaching out as if to grab him and keep him in place. “Co-Op City’s huge! How am I supposed to find you there? I’ll get lost, I’ll -”

“Easy-peasy,” Eddie said again, his voice beginning to fade as well. Only his eyes remained solidly there, staring at the boy as the rest of him disappeared like mist in the morning sun. “Same way you found the rose and the key, right? You just go and you’ll get where you need to be. This afternoon, Jake, alright? You’ll have to be quick though. Quick and quiet and clever. You can do it. We’ll be waiting.”

Alain stepped forward himself, not sure what he wanted to do - speak to the boy, perhaps, or touch Eddie’s fading shade and see if he might not be able to anchor it more firmly in place. A dozen questions swirled around in his mind. That this was of great import, he had no doubt, and yet he knew so little about what was meant - and suspected that Eddie, upon waking, wouldn’t know much more. 

But he found that he was fading even faster. When he walked, his feet sank into the black surface, miring him up to his knees. Jake wasn’t even looking at him any longer. He suspected he might have disappeared from the boy’s view entirely. It made sense. Eddie was the door, and the door was swinging closed, with Alain on one side of it and Jake on the other.

The last thing he heard Eddie say, before he was unceremoniously ejected from the dream, was: “The answer is a river.”

\---

The next day, Eddie’s weird dream was the last thing on his mind. Upon waking, it had retreated into the same misty place that all of his dreams lived. Vaguely, he recalled shooting hoops - he thought maybe Alain had been there, which was a hoot and a half to imagine - and talking to some kid, but not much else. Other concerns took precedent.

Chief among them was a question which had been rattling around in his mind for a while. The thing was - well, the thing was Susannah. The thing was that he liked Susannah a lot. The thing was that he loved Susannah, and it wasn’t in the distracted, half-assed sort of way that he had ‘loved’ the other girls he’d been with, the ones who were there pretty much just because they liked getting high and he liked having sex with someone other than his own hand, who he never really joked or laughed or played around with.

It was real and true and deep, and he wasn’t exactly an old-fashioned kind of guy, but he felt like she was a lot more than just a  _ girlfriend _ .

And it wasn’t like he couldn’t just carve her a ring and tell her he was crazy about her, but he wanted it to mean something more than that. He wanted it to be more public, more of a commitment. Not just between them but in front of the little group of weirdos that made up the whole of the known world.

He’d been thinking about it for a while. The thought would come drifting in while he laid with her at night, while he sat in the light of the fire and carved, while they were walking and he looked at her and thought about how dearly he loved the sparkle of her eyes and the curl of her hair and the way she laughed. 

One by one, he’d considered and rejected most of their companions. Roland was caught up in his own trouble - less now, since Eddie had given him the unfinished key, but still there - and, anyway, never had Eddie met a man who seemed less like he knew the first damn thing about love or romance. Maybe Roland wasn’t a robot, but Eddie couldn’t exactly picture him getting sweaty palms about asking a girl to dance, either. 

Cuthbert probably knew plenty about that sort of thing, but Eddie didn’t want to ask him for the same reason he felt instinctively driven to hide his carving from him: he didn’t think he could bear for Cuthbert to laugh at him about it. With the carving, it would just be humiliating. If he opened his heart up about Susannah, though, and Cuthbert  _ laughed _ … well, Eddie didn’t think he’d  _ win _ that fight, but he didn’t think he’d turn and walk away from it either.

That left Alain. He was plenty approachable, in a quiet, awkward kind of way, but it did feel weird. He was hard to read. Eddie would have bet money Roland didn’t know shit about girl problems, and wouldn’t have even bothered to bet that Cuthbert got more ass than a toilet seat - back before someone had blown off half his face, anyway, and probably in the intervening years, too - but he didn’t get much of a vibe one way or the other from Alain. Did women in the cowboy apocalypse go for the strong, silent, sensitive types? He wasn’t a pretty boy like Cuthbert, but he was handsome in his own way.

So Eddie mulled over how to bring it up, and how to get Alain away from the others to bring it up privately, and therefore he was caught completely by surprise when, the day after Eddie handed the key over to Roland, Alain appeared at his elbow and asked him to come talk with him.

Obviously there was something on the big guy’s mind. As soon as they got away from the others, though, Eddie grabbed at his chance. If he let it slip by now, god only knew when he’d be able to get the courage up next.

“Hey, man, can I ask you something?”

Alain eyed him quietly for a moment, then nodded. “‘S’on your mind?” He wasn’t being short, exactly - he just hadn’t talked much lately. And he seemed tired and bleary and half-there, which happened more and more. Vaguely, Eddie was worried - and he had an idea Roland and Cuthbert were more worried about it - that something had gone seriously wrong the last time Alain had gone into Roland’s head to fix him.

And, of course, he choked. Eddie stopped and ran his hands back through his hair, then turned in a little circle, trying to gather his thoughts together and find a way to say it. “It’s… well… Do you know much about, you know, ladies?”

Alain stopped as well and said, very cautiously, “I’ve sewn - I’ve known women. Yes. In what wise do you mean?”

“You know. Like.” Eddie waved a hand. “Like, romantically. Did you ever have a steady girl or - or like, a wife, or anything? Did any of you guys ever get, I don’t know, betrothèd?”

A strange expression came over Alain’s face, one that looked like he didn’t know if he wanted to bolt or just start laughing. “I - no, Eddie. In that area, I imagine you are much more - know more. Is all well between you and Susannah?”

“Oh, yeah, man, everything’s great. I guess that’s kind of, like, the problem.” He took a deep breath, and took the plunge. “I want to be more than just - just some guy, you know? I wanted to ask you about, God, I don’t know, it sounds stupid now… You know like how the captain of a ship can marry people, right? I was thinking maybe, I don’t know, like Roland is this big-shot leader and all…”

“You want to know if he can marry you to Susannah,” Alain said, sounding deeply relieved. That sort of touched Eddie - had he really been that worried their relationship was going south? “In -” He waved a hand, frustrated. “Legally. Together.  _ Bound _ .”

“Yeah! Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m wondering. And, you know, what it would be like. Guess we can’t have much of a ceremony out here in the woods, no bachelor parties for sure, but it’d be nice to do a little something.”

“He could. Any of us could. Roland is dinh, so he ruse - he could refusel.” Hastily, perhaps seeing - or feeling - the distress that idea gave Eddie, he added, “I can’t imagine as he would. I simply would you mean ask him. Have him say the words then. As for the trappings…” Alain glanced around the woods, that thoughtful look on his face that he got when he was carefully considering his words. That was one thing Eddie liked about Alain. You knew that when he said something, he’d thought about it beforehand.

“Sorry, I don’t mean to put you on the spot. I guess you might not know, if you’ve never been married.” That struck him, now that the rush of anxiety at speaking his feelings aloud was dissipating, as very sad. On top of everything else that made these guys’ lives into a shit sandwich, to have spent the whole time single -

“I never said that, Eddie.” Alain glanced at him sidelong, and there was a definite twinkle of amusement in his eyes. “Been married fie - nigh on forty years. Betrothed and married in the Hall of Grandfathers in Castle Gilead. Was Roland’s own father spoke the words.”

Frowning, Eddie said, “But I just asked if you ever had a woman, and you said -”

“I’m married to  _ Cuthbert _ ,” Alain said, almost gently, as if taking pity on how tangled up and confused Eddie was. “I’ve never been with a woman.”

A number of thoughts rose, clamoring, to the surface of Eddie’s mind in the wake of that statement. Unable to voice them all at once, he opened his mouth and let one come out more or less at random: “Wait, you’re gay?”

There came that light, cobwebby feeling of Alain’s mind touching his. “That is a word in your world which means men who lays with other men?” he said, a hint of a question in his voice. “It is not one of the terms we used when I was growing up, but yes, I suppose that would be accurate. I’ve never wanted women.” He regarded Eddie curiously, and with very open, very unmistakable amusement. “I’m surprised. I’m never been open about it, for politeness, but everyone is always seem to know, since I was a boy.”

“Well,” said Eddie, lamely, his mouth mostly talking on autopilot while his brain worked overtime to synthesize this new information into his understanding of the world, “I guess you just… don’t… seem very, like… you know, girly.”

“And why should I be, if I wish attract the attentions of men who desire other men?”

To that one, Eddie had no answer. He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again and asked another question entirely. “So you got married to a man? Like, they let you do that?”

Alain shrugged. “It was unusual, certainly. I had always imagined that I would need to marry a woman and set a gun on her, but for once, the workings of ka aligned themselves with my wishes. Our fathers gave permission, and sai Deschain ultimately agreed to allow it. In most cases, the answer might have been no, but ours wasn’t exactly typical. We spent a long time coming up with arguments… ” Cocking his head, he asked, “Is such not… allowed… in your world, then? You seem very taken aback.”

“Queers getting married? Nah, man, that’s not allowed. That’s, like… It’s just for men and women. I mean, I don’t, you know, have a problem with queers or anything, but why would you even want to - I mean, it’s not like you guys are gonna have kids, right?” Aware that he was babbling, Eddie made a supreme effort to close his idiot mouth before he pissed off the one guy here who actually seemed to like him. “Yeah, no. Guys can’t marry each other. Girls can’t marry each other either. And people are a lot more, like, private about it. There’s the whole AIDS thing, it’s like - okay, you don’t know what that is, it’s this disease that - it’s not important. Whatever. Point is, it’s kind of a big deal to even admit to that where I’m from, so I’m just having a bit of a hard time adjusting to, like -  _ Cuthbert _ is gay? I mean, like, I can kinda see it, guy’s sorta fruity, but -”

“Cuthbert likes women just fine,” Alain said. “He just likes sex. I don’t think it much matters to him who with, so long as they please him. He just wants to please and be pleasing.”

“Jesus, that makes you sound like you guys are swingers or something.” Eddie held up a warning hand. “ _ Don’t _ tell me if you guys are swingers.”

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. Then Alain spoke again, once more with that note of caution in his voice. “Your thoughts are not clear to me right now, Eddie, but you seem… upset. Does it bother you to know this about us?”

Eddie took another deep breath. He met Alain’s gaze square, though every part of him wanted to look away, run away, pretend he hadn’t even had this conversation. It wasn’t that he had a problem with queers - he  _ didn’t _ . He’d known a couple back on Earth. Hard not to, in the circles he’d run in. He hadn’t even minded the couple of times a guy had come onto him; it was sort of flattering, even if he wasn’t interested.

It was just… weird. He hadn’t expected it. And Alain had said it so casually, like he didn’t even expect there would be a problem. Eddie was beyond unequipped to tell this guy about the whole history of queer-bashing in America, or how in the year he came from, people were afraid to touch subway seats or public phones that a fag might’ve used because they thought they might get AIDS from it. And it was just such a massive re-ordering of the way he’d imagined the world to be. He’d never thought that he might spend months eating, sleeping, and spending every day in the company of a couple of queers and  _ not even know _ . They seemed so normal, both of them.

“I’m not… upset,” he said, trying to speak slow, trying to think before he let the words come out. “It doesn’t bother me. I’m still cool with you guys. I guess it’s pretty cool that your society was like, okay with it. Ours isn’t, so that’s one you guys got up on us. I guess it just kinda caught me by surprise, that’s all.”

He went quiet again, and Alain didn’t try to talk, just kept looking at him with that curious expression, his head cocked a little. Eventually another idea percolated through Eddie’s mind and into speakability: “Okay, but… Cuthbert?”

Alain raised his eyebrows. “He has been a dear friend to me our whole lives. And he’s very handsome.”

“No offense, but he’s kind of a jerk, isn’t he? I mean, some of the shit I’ve heard him say to you…” Eddie shrugged, a bit jerkily. He didn’t really want to bring his whole beef with Cuthbert up right then. What he wanted to talk about was Susannah, or, maybe, something completely different than this whole marriage issue. “You’re a real nice guy, you know.”

“Oh, I have my moments,” said Alain quietly, a little smile twisting his mouth - not quite bitter, not quite rueful, but close to both. “Cuthbert has been getting under your skin, hasn’t he? I’ve hardly noticed, been… with Roland…” Another one of those vague waves of the hand, where he couldn’t quite make the words match up. “He doesn’t mean to be cruel. He doesn’t always see how it hits, is all. I wouldn’t say I take more than half of the words that come out of his mouth seriously, and you shouldn’t either.”

“If you say so,” Eddie said doubtfully. “Still, I dunno. Maybe you should have someone nicer than a guy you have to ignore half the time.”

Alain didn’t say anything. His mouth curled in a slow, terribly  _ knowing  _ smile, and he simply looked at Eddie, his eyes suddenly dark and intent in a way which sent a shivery sort of heat through the pit of Eddie’s stomach. An image flickered through his mind, so quickly he barely understood it before it was gone, half a dozen sensations piled on each other at once: moonlight dappling bare skin, broad fingers tangling gently but insistently in his hair, a hot mouth against his.

Face so flaming hot he was sure it had to be bright red, Eddie stepped back, hands raised in protest. “No! No, nothing like - I’m really not -” then he saw the gleam of wicked amusement in Alain’s eyes, and the way he was struggling not to smile, and huffed out a disbelieving laugh. “Okay, you know what, maybe you two deserve each other. Fuck you.”

“I have my moments,” Alain said again. His smile faded, and his eyes grew serious. “This is not what I took you aside to speak of, though, Eddie. Do you recall the dream you had last night?”

Talk about mood whiplash. Eddie frowned, thinking, then shook his head. “Not really. I was playing basketball, I think. That’s an Earth game where you -”

“Throw a large orange ball through a hoop,” Alain interrupted, eyeing him intently. He mimed throwing a basketball. “Right?”

A cold shiver worked its way up Eddie’s spine. “Yeah. Did you pull that out of my brain, or what?”

“I remember what you dreamed last night, Eddie. I was there.” Alain drew close to him again, and reached out to take hold of his arm. “The boy. Jake. Do you remember?”

Eddie fought the urge to pull away. If Alain wanted to hold him in place, he could. Still, it was spooky, the way those eyes drilled into him. Normally so thoughtful, even dreamy, Alain’s face was now focused and hard, intent. There were dark, bruised circles beneath his eyes. “I don’t remember. Are you saying it was some kind of - of weird psychic dream, though?”  _ Like the one with the deli and the rose? _

“I believe so. Jake is searching us to you. Why you, I could not say. As if you are… a door, an opening… a way to or thought. That key you carved… It isn’t done yet, is it?”

“I don’t know.” Eddie shrugged with one shoulder. “I mean, it’s pretty much mostly done. Seems to have done the trick for Ol’ Long, Tall, and Ugly, hasn’t it?”

That weak attempt at humor did nothing to soften Alain’s manner. “It does seem to have. And I thank you for that. I was near the end of my ability to help him. But I don’t think you were drawn to carve it only to quiet Roland’s divided mind.”

As far as Eddie could tell, Alain had needed to go into Roland’s mind and do… whatever it was he did in there… three more times since they’d started traveling on the path of the Beam. Each time it took him longer and he came out of it looking more and more wrecked, and each time the effects seemed to last for less time. The last two times had been only a day apart, and the very last time, Eddie was pretty sure he’d had a seizure.

That had been four days ago. He hadn’t fallen down and started flailing all over the place, but he’d let go of Roland very abruptly and his eyes had rolled back into his head and he had sagged back heavily against Cuthbert, who’d sat beside him the whole time, and his hands had twitched and he’d kept jerking his head back and forth. When he’d woken up properly, he hadn’t recognized Susannah and Eddie, and he asked for Jamie, for Tommy, and for someone named Claire. And ever since he’d been… weird. Slow, sleepy. His hands shook and he dropped things. His words didn’t come out right.  For the day afterwards, most everything he’d said had been outright gibberish, and he still had to stop and think and talk real slow to get anything to come out how it was supposed to.

He hadn’t done it since. Last night, when Eddie had been moved to give Roland the key, Roland had been sitting awake at the edge of camp, head clutched in his hands like it might come apart if he didn’t hold onto it tight enough.

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. That key was something momentous. He knew that. And what Alain said about the dream - well, he remembered the rose, didn’t he? It felt like that, even if he couldn’t recall. All that weight of destiny, though, of responsibility - of ka,  _ kaka  _ \- scared the bejesus out of him. “I don’t know, I mean, maybe it  _ is _ just to keep him okay until we get wherever we need to go. I don’t know. Doesn’t seem like you know.”

“No,” Alain said, after a moment. There was no pity in his slow, blue-eyed regard. He might have been kinder than the other two, more patient, he might have felt softer in some ways, but when it came to shucking up your sleeves and shoveling whatever shit God or the universe or ka or whatever you wanted to call it handed on down, Eddie had an idea that he didn’t have any patience for shirking. “I don’t. But I think you do. I think it’s very important, Eddie. I’m curious what you’ll dream tonight, that I am. I want you to try to remember it.”

And pinned under that pitiless stare - pitiless, because the mere fact that it had to be done meant it was Eddie’s duty, but at the same time full of sympathy, because he knew maybe better than any of them that it was hard - all Eddie could do was nod and say he would try.


	22. Chapter 22

Next morning, just as Eddie was sitting up and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, Roland came over and crouched on his hunkers beside him.

“‘Morning,” Eddie mumbled. Whatever Roland wanted, he wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with it this early, but he couldn’t exactly tell the guy to fuck off, either.

“Alain told me of your talk yesterday,” Roland said, without preamble.

Suddenly, Eddie was wide awake. He glanced at Susannah, waking beside him, and then looked back at Roland and tried, with every bit of self-control he possessed, to sound casual when he said, “Oh, yeah?”

A small smile flitted across Roland’s face. “Yes. I would be happy to do as you wish. Though I believe I’ll wait until you’ve asked the woman first.”

“Asked the woman what?” Susannah inquired sleepily. Halfway through she broke off into an enormous yawn, then carried on looking at Eddie, blinking a bit as she woke all the way up.

Trapped between them, Eddie examined his options and promptly surrendered. “You have a real great sense of timing, Roland, you know that?” he groused. “This is  _ not _ how I wanted to pop the question, but since I guess this guy’s not leaving me any choice… Susannah, will you cowboy apocalypse marry me?”

Susannah squinted at him, as if maybe she thought this was some sort of prank, or another dream. Then, grinning, she threw her arms around him and kissed him very firmly. When she came up for air a good couple of minutes later, she said, “Of course, honey. I’d love to cowboy apocalypse marry you.” Looking over his shoulder at Roland, she asked, “Are we gonna need rings or something?”

“It is not needed, although you may exchange them if you wish.”

Eddie had already carved a pair of rings out of a pleasant-scented, reddish wood he’d found. What sort of tree it came from, he couldn’t say, because he’d only found a few chunks of it as deadfall and snatched them up to work on, but as soon as he’d seen it he’d known it would be just perfect for that. 

He pulled his pack around into his lap and began going through it, looking for them. The hodgepodge in there couldn’t compare to the survivalist’s wet dream contained in each of the gunslingers’ purses, but shit sure added up. He dug past various odds and ends - folded scraps of deerskin, a couple cords of braided leather, several ongoing projects, including the slingshot - and finally came up with the rings, carefully wrapped up in a furry square of rabbit pelt.

“I know it’s not exactly a fine rock,” he said sheepishly, holding them both up so Susannah could see, “but I figured, you know, something’s better than nothing.”

“Why, Eddie,” she said, smiling dopily at him. “Just how long have you been planning this?”

Eddie could only shrug. He’d been pretty sure Susannah would say yes, pretty sure she felt the same way, but somehow it still felt a little presumptuous to say he’d been thinking about it for as long as he had.

Susannah pressed a warm, lingering kiss to his mouth, then looked at Roland. “So how’s this go, boss man?”

“We’ll need to make some alterations to the basic ceremony,” Roland said, rubbing his cheek thoughtfully. “Neither of your fathers are present, for a start, so I suppose Alain and Cuthbert will need to stand in for them. We shan’t be able to record aught in your family trees, nor start a new family roll, of course. It is a relatively straightforward affair, however.”

Eddie was more than a little afraid that Roland’s ‘relatively straightforward affair’ was going to turn out to be some kind of multi-day ritual like the passing of the guns had been. On that front, at least, his worries were put to rest. As it was described to him, it really would be simple: two spaces would be prepared for them, one east and one west. They would be taken to separate points just beyond the eastward area, Eddie to the north and Susannah to the south, and there blindfolded, then walked first to the westward area, where they would affirm their desire to marry, and then from there to the eastward one, where Roland would say the actual words and - as a nod to their earthly origins - they would exchange rings.

Still, simple as it seemed to be, when the time came, Eddie found himself practically shaking with nerves. He stood just far enough that he couldn’t see the cleared out area, Cuthbert at his side, his whole body jangling unpleasantly. 

_ God, I want a fix. _ A wave of self-loathing came immediately on the heels of that thought. Here he was, about the marry the most incredible woman he’d ever met, and all he could think about was wanting to get high?

A hand came down on his shoulder. Eddie about jumped out of his skin. For a moment he’d entirely forgotten that Cuthbert was standing right beside him.

“Fret not, Eddie!” He gave Eddie’s shoulder a jovial squeeze. “Once you’ve got a woman to this point, why, ‘tis precious easy to get through the next few minutes, and then she can’t get away from you any longer.”

“Oh,” Eddie said, “is that what’s up with you and Alain? You guys just haven’t invented divorce yet?”

Cuthbert took it in stride. He laughed and patted Eddie roughly on the back, then finally withdrew his hand. “Say true, that could be. But then, if your options were myself or our dear Roland, who would you choose?”

In spite of himself, Eddie cracked a shaky smile. “Jeez, so he’s like, the ugly friend you stand next to so you look cuter? That’s cold, man.”

“We all do what we must in these hard times, Eddie.” Cuthbert looked him over almost seriously, though he was still smiling. “Worry not, though. It’s clear yon woman cares for you. Stay upright and speak as you’re required to, and you shall do just fine.”

Eddie took a deep breath and tried to take his words to heart. It helped, a little, when Cuthbert put the blindfold over his eyes. That way he just had to let himself be led, down in a loop from their position to the westward clearing, where Roland had set up two circles of sticks and brush for him and Susannah to stand in. Each circle had bullets placed at the cardinal points - according to Roland, traditionally the marriage circles for a gunslinger were done with powder as well as shells, but of course they didn’t have the powder to spare.

Standing there, he heard the telltale sound of Susannah’s wheelchair rumbling over the ground. They were far enough apart he couldn’t reach out to her, but just knowing she was there - and probably as nervous as he was - helped a bit.

“Here before us come Eddie Dean, son of Wilbur, and Susannah Holmes, daughter of Dan. They come to be joined as one family, one house, one body. As the sun does set in the west, so too has ended their lives as single people. From now until forevermore, they shall be joined together as one. Do any here object?

Silence. Eddie’s nerves drew tight as a string about to break. A lunatic urge seized him to open his mouth and yell that yeah, someone objected,  _ he _ objected, on the grounds that he was a piece of shit and Susannah couldn’t possibly actually want to  _ marry _ him, and, oh yeah, what did it even matter when they were probably all going to be dead in a month anyway?

He bit the inside of his cheek.

After a moment, Roland went on. “If none object, then I would hear those who are to be wedded state their intent. Eddie, do you wish to take this woman to wife?”

He’d been coached on how the call and response went. There was a bit of wiggle room, of course, for personalizing the vows, but there was a basic template he was expected to follow. All of that flew right out of his head, despite it having been told to him an hour earlier. “Yeah,” he said, lamely, and then into the ringing silence that followed - somehow he could just  _ imagine _ the looks on everyone’s faces - he added, “I, uh - I do. Wish to take her to be my wife, I mean. I pledge to, uh, keep and care for her, and to support and love her, and to be faithful to her as she is to me.”

That seemed to do the trick. Roland waited a moment longer to see if he had anything to add, then went on. “And do you, Susannah, accept this man as your husband?”

“Yes,” Susannah said, sounding distinctly amused, though a little shaky herself. “I accept him, and pledge to keep and care for him, too, and support and love him, and be faithful to him as he is to me.” That was not, in Eddie’s understanding, the traditional wifely vow, but then Susannah was in many ways not a traditional sort of woman, and certainly would not want to be unilaterally  _ kept _ .

“Then all are in agreement, and you two shall be wed.”

More walking. Now they moved into the westward area. Eddie went where he was guided and stopped when he was told to. Shortly, Cuthbert pulled the blindfold off him. He found that he had been stood facing Susannah, inside of one larger, singular circle of brush and twigs. Alain nudged the circle back into shape where the wheels of Susannah’s chair had disturbed it, while the two of them blinked at each other, a bit discombobulated after their stretch of blindness.

Both Alain and Cuthbert withdrew beyond the boundaries of the circle, while Roland stood just outside of it. “Now these two rise, as does the sun, into a new life joined to each other. They have agreed to be so bound, and have been recognized in the sight of gods and man. You may exchange your tokens, now.”

Eddie fetched the smooth little wooden ring out of his pocket and went down on one knee. It took him three tries to get it on Susannah’s finger, because his hands were shaking so much. There was a bit of tremble in hers as well, and in the smile she directed at him, so he didn’t feel so bad, although she did get the ring onto him much more smoothly.

“You may exit the circle, now,” Roland said, “as one.” 

And that simply, it was done.

Eddie walked beside Susannah, and deliberately trod on the brush making up the circle to break it. Since she had to roll herself, he couldn’t hold her hand, but he did put a hand on her shoulder, and they walked into their new life together.

That night there came another surprise. The gunslingers had done what they could to put together a marital bed. It was, truth be told, a somewhat sorry collection of skins and hides and blankets, didn’t hold a candle to even the rattiest motel Eddie had ever spent a night in, but it would be a damn sight more comfortable then the ground or the thin cover of the single blankets they usually used. 


	23. Chapter 23

Alain dreamed. It was, by then, a familiar scene. The huge, towering stone tenements, crammed full of human beings; the cracked asphalt and concrete - words he had gleaned from Eddie’s mind - sprouting stubborn weeds; the glint of broken glass on the ground, the boarded over windows, the shabby and sagging air of disrepair; he recognized it all very well.

The boys, too, he recognized. He had never met Henry Dean, nor heard much of him save what Eddie had shared around the fire of a night, and Eddie had purged himself of most of that poison on his long walk up the beach with Roland Cuthbert. Nonetheless, he was instantly recognizable. The shade of him in Eddie’s dreaming mind seeped a greasy aura like an oil slick, one that stuck to everything he touched and, invisible to Eddie’s own mind, clung onto Eddie’s feet like a second shadow. 

At first he’d hung back, not wanting to be seen. Gradually he’d become bolder, for it seemed that nothing much of import happened. The whole dream had a suspended feel to it, as if time were not really passing, not even in the uneven, jerky way it often did in dreams. There was a great sense of something waiting to happen. 

_ Strangers make Henry nervous, and when he’s nervous he gets mean. _ Eddie had said that to young Jake in the first dream, in the bear’s clearing. Alain found it to be quite true. When he made himself known, the dream shade of Henry Dean took an immediate dislike to him. He engaged the two boys a handful of times, to see what they might say, and then took to simply exploring. The world in Eddie’s dreaming mind went on for quite a long way, and this vast metropolis was fascinatingly alien. Alain doubted he could have stood to be in such a place in the flesh, for the crush of human minds and feelings would overwhelm him, but in the dream the only ones who had any substance were Henry and Eddie.

This time, though, the dream felt different. The air was oppressively charged, like in the still, flat moments before a storm broke. Alain came within site of the play-yard and hung about, hidden from the brothers, and waited.

And surely enough, this time it changed. Eddie and Henry had a discussion amongst themselves, and then left. Alain started to follow, but then had the feeling that he needed to wait longer. Rarely was it so clear, and so he stayed right where he was. 

Shortly, Jake came along. He wandered in looking terribly lost, but lit up with recognition when he saw the play-yard. Moreover: he saw Alain, who he had barely seemed to notice before.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he asked. He stood some ways away, as if he were wary, but his tone and face were open. Not casual, no; there was a terrible hunger in him. Jake had suffered as badly as Roland, these past weeks, and with no one to give him comfort. “You’re a gunslinger.”

Alain looked down at himself. He was not dressed in the same clothes his slumbering body wore, but in the clothes he had once worn when Castle Gilead still stood and he was a young novice born to the guns, with a rich life and inheritance ahead of him. Around his waist were buckled both of his father’s guns. “Yes.”

“You know  _ him. _ ” Hunger, need, love. Jake had loved Roland, even in the moment of his betrayal. Even having lived with the knowledge of that ultimate betrayal, the need to see Roland still shone nakedly from his young face. “Can you take me to him? Am I here to find you? I thought I needed to find that other kid.”

“You’re only dreaming me,” Alain said. “It’s Eddie you’ll need to follow. The younger one. They went this way. Follow me, I’ll show you.”

He joined the boy and walked beside him down the street, following Eddie and Henry. They came into view easily enough, though he and Jake hung well back enough not to be spotted. As they walked, they talked. Jake told Alain of the terrible mental battle he’d been waging for the last few weeks, and once more Alain was struck by the strength of the boy’s touch. Roland had held out longer, but for Roland the problem had grown gradually. For Jake it had come on all at once, in a moment of simultaneous shocking death and utter mundanity.

The boy was eager to talk. There was no one in his life in the waking world that he could talk to about the waystation, or the desert, or the man in black, or his terrifying trip beneath the mountains with Roland. He told Alain much that Roland had glossed over - the demon in the speaking stones, for instance, which had tranced Jake and so very nearly taken him. 

After he spoke of that, Jake went quiet, and cocked his head, and then asked, “Who is Susan?”

Alain glanced at the boy from the corner of his eye. “Why do you ask?” Though he full well knew why. He had thought that it was obvious why Roland didn’t wish to speak to him and Cuthbert of his encounter with the demon, for it had surely tormented him by taking on Susan’s aspect. Just remembering it would have been painful enough.

“You said something about her,” Jake said. Alain had not spoken that thought out loud, but it must have seemed very loud indeed to the boy’s touch. “Why wouldn’t he want to think of her?” And then, a moment later, still with the airy lack of concern of a boy who didn’t truly understand what he was doing, “Oh, because she’s dead now, right?”

“That’s right. She died a long time ago, and he feels at fault.” They had all of them been at fault. They had been witched, Roland most of all. Alain still did not like to think of the object that had done it, that ghastly thing which might even now be rolling about their ruined world, seeking to ruin it just a little bit more. 

“A lot of people have died for him.” Jake looked up at him, then reached out and took his hand. “We both died for him.”

“I’ve not died yet, so you are ahead of me on that score.” Alain struggled to keep his tone light. That he would die in Roland’s service he had never doubted, not since he was a boy, but to hear this boy speak of it with such assurance unsettled him.

“You usually die before Jericho Hill,” Jake said. “Neither of you survive it, usually. Cuthbert blows that horn and dies holding onto it and he never picks it up. He died this time too, but you fixed it. Sometimes all of you make it and you live together in a cottage by the sea. That’s always nice. But he always comes along and takes you away from it. I feel sorry for all of us, but I think I feel sorrier for him, because he doesn’t ever really die. He just starts over again.”

All the hair stood up on Alain’s arms.  _ Then blow that fucking horn!  _ Cuthbert, laughing, dying, bloody, his eye dangling from its ruined socket, raising the Horn of Eld to his battered mouth to sound one final advance - no quarter, absolutely none, no surrender - it was a vision which had haunted Alain since he was old enough to remember his dreams. He had thought, for a very long time, that it was Cuthbert’s death.

And the rest of it -  _ Death, gunslinger, but not for you. Never for you.  _

Jake squeezed his hand. “It’s cold,” he said, with great sympathy. It was very hot, stiflingly so. Sweat stood on Alain’s forehead and face, and stuck his hair to the back of his neck.

A terrible urge took hold of Alain, to ask this boy whether or not he would see the Tower. If he did, he believed the answer would be quite true.

Before he could either give in or resist, though, the boy let go of his hand. “I have to go now,” he said. “That’s where I need to go. I’m going to leave soon. Dud-a-chum, dad-a-chee, not to worry, I’ve got the key!” And so saying, he darted off, across the street.

During their walk, they had trod the same length of cracked sidewalk. Now, though, it abruptly changed. They were in a neighborhood, and across from them slumped the most chillingly malevolent building Alain had ever laid eyes on. He’d been in many a haunted place, but even in a dream, that house exuded such energy that he felt compelled to step back. Its windows were out, but it was not marked with the scrawled graffiti that marked most of the other surfaces he’d seen. It seemed to huddle in on itself, fallen into a state of disrepair, but he suspected that was simply how it chose to look. In another forty years, it would still look exactly the same as it did now.

That was what Eddie and Henry had come to see. That was where they were going to lead Jake in their present time on their Earth. That was where Jake was going to cross over.

And Jake had his own key, but Eddie hadn’t ever finished theirs. Alain  _ knew _ , with a certainty he so rarely felt in these dreams, that Jake’s key alone would not be enough. The door had to be opened from both sides, and Eddie was the only one among them who could open it.

\---

Alain opened his eyes to darkness. He woke with difficulty, as he always did from such dreams. The urgent sense of  _ needing to do something _ \- what, he did not know, but he knew it needed done - followed him up out of it, turning his thoughts muddy and thick. He stared up at the night sky, the pale moonlight slanting through the forest canopy, with dull incomprehension.

Half-formed thoughts ran through his mind. The key, the door, the unfound rose.  _ Dud-a-chum, dad-a-chee _ . Like those lobster things, the ones Cuthbert had called Curious Shrimp - a flash of an image, something he had seen but not lived: his pale dirty hand on the sand, his fingers disappearing into the thing’s gullet, the moment between seeing it happen and the thunderous pain hitting -

The key, the door, the unfound rose - they key, the door - the door, the house, that open mouth -

He closed his eyes and turned his head, nuzzling into Cuthbert’s soft hair. The litany of his thoughts followed him as he drifted back down into sleep, becoming sticky and slow the less awake he got. The key, the door, the unfound rose -

A violent series of twitching spasms woke him back up. He shifted as best he could. He drew his good leg up, then laid it back flat, flexing his toes to try to drive out the needling sense of restlessness. His bad leg simply twitched, jostling itself unpleasantly. 

He put the hand that Cuthbert wasn’t laying on over his face and closed his eyes. In, he breathed, very slowly, and then out, and let his own awareness flow out with that breath. Not all the way, but just enough to fall asleep despite the distractions of his unquiet body.

\---

The following morning, as they broke their fast, Alain came to a decision.

“Eddie,” he said. “The key. Take it back. You need to finish it, and soon.”

Roland and Eddie both looked at him. Unconsciously, Roland’s hand went to the key, which hung on a rawhide thong around his neck. It had given him great peace, and, recalling well the agony he had suffered before Eddie had given it to him, he was deeply reluctant to surrender it. At the same time, he knew that if Alain said it must be so, then it must be so.

Eddie’s thoughts were simpler, though no less conflicted: he was afraid. The weight of responsibility sat heavy on his shoulders, which were unused to it. In his mind the voice of his brother echoed loudly, telling him he had no worth, that he had no abilities, that he would bungle this as he had bungled everything else in his life.

“Say you so?” Roland asked.

“I do.” On that, Alain was very firm. “The time - the time that Jake approaches -” He stopped, and stilled his stuttering tongue, and tried not to let it show on his face how it worried him that this was still happening. “He will come through soon. You know this as well, do you not, Eddie?”

Eddie knew, though he didn’t wish to. He scuffed at the dirt, not quite meeting anyone’s eyes, and then sighed. “Yeah. I mean, I guess. I’ve been having these weird dreams, I think, though I can’t remember much.” He looked up, almost pleading. “I mean, though, we don’t  _ know  _ \- “

“We do,” said Alain, calmly. Oftentimes his dreams of prophecy were frustratingly vague. He never knew almost until the event occurred what was real and what was merely symbol, or nonsense dredged up from his undermind during sleep. These dreams involving Jake and Eddie and Eddie’s dead brother, though, were clear as clear could be. Perhaps that was the boy’s influence. “Your undermind remembers. I remember well enough, too. You’ve been dreaming of the day the boy comes through. It is fast approaching. We will need your key.”

“Jake has his own key, does he not?” asked Roland. 

“Yes,” said Alain, at the same time as Eddie said, more reluctantly, “Yeah.”

They looked at each other a moment. Then Eddie went on, “Yeah. He does. But it’s not gonna be enough. Don’t ask me how I know - maybe Uri Geller here could tell you, but I sure as shit can’t - but I do know. His isn’t gonna be enough, and I don’t think the damn kid knows that.”

Roland held the key up. A ripple of surprise went briefly across his thoughts, as if he hadn’t even noticed he was holding onto it. Then, with a rueful twist to his mouth, he jerked hard on it, breaking the leather thong, and held it out. “Here. You take this back, then. I should not have ever taken it from you, I suspect, no matter how great was my need.”

Eddie accepted the key doubtfully. “I mean, I’m pretty sure it’s good you didn’t go crazy.”

“We do all appreciate you with your head on the right way,” said Cuthbert. “No doubt Al appreciates getting a rest from mucking around in there as well. A more beastly task I don’t think I could imagine, Ro, for all that I love you.”

“Nevertheless,” Roland said. “I will be able to cope. The voices are much quieted. They never entirely went away, though, and I do believe that is because you aren’t finished.” Now he fixed his gaze on Alain. “You say the time is approaching?”

“Very soon. A matter of days.” Frowning, unwilling to make any sure statement without thought, Alain considered the feeling of the dream, the hints he had received of when in time it might occur. “I am not sure if time passes at the same rate between our two worlds -”

“It doesn’t,” Eddie put in. “I noticed that when we were fucking around on the beach. It’s faster over here.”

Alain nodded. “I can’t say when any certainty when. Less than a week.”

“And where’s he gonna come through, huh?” Eddie asked. “Did you pick that up out of my brain while I was asleep?”

Mildly, Alain said, “I do not choose to be pulled into your dreams, Eddie. I believe the boy is reaching me through you. But no, I do not know where. Not on our side, at least. On yours, though, I did.” He paused once more, and thought again, this time of how to describe the place he had seen. It was not a house. It had likely never been a house. That was simply the guise that it wore in that place, at that time, so that it might go unbothered. “It looks like a house. But very old, very broken. It is an evil place. A haunted place. Your brother took you there to see it, and Jake will have followed you -”

“Oh my god,” said Eddie, “do you mean the Mansion? The Mansion on Dutch Hill? Jesus Christ. I totally forgot about that fuckin’ place until…” A queer look came over his face. “A couple weeks ago, I guess. When we were in that creepy clearing with the portal, I thought about the Mansion. It reminded me of it somehow.”

“That was a thin place,” Alain said. “So, too, is this Mansion. There is a way through for him there, but the danger is great.”

“What kinda danger we talking about, exactly?” asked Eddie. His tone was teasing, but he kept running his thumb along the grooves in the key in quite the same manner as a man praying the rosary. “Like, what, exposed wiring? Asbestos? Ghosts?”

“There may be ghosts. I have not seen the place myself, you understand, but maybe a demon.”

“Christ,” Eddie muttered. “Of course. Nothing is easy with you guys, is it? Kid can’t just walk through a door, he’s gotta win a jousting match with Satan first.” Looking at the key in his hand, he sighed, and said, “I don’t even want to think about what  _ we’re _ gonna have to do over here in apocalypse hellworld, I can tell you that much.”

Neither, in truth, did Alain. 

\---

That day, as the sun rose towards noon, they came across the old Great Road, and the travel marker. 

“What’s Midworld?” Susannah asked, peering up at it. She stretched and reached up to trace the Great Letters carved into the stone face, so deeply incised they were still visible God only knew how many decades later.

“It was once a great kingdom,” Roland answered, “which bordered the lands of my youth. In more civilized days, it was a beacon of light and knowledge. Just across the border once lay a great city, much like the New York from whence the two of you came.”

“God and the Man Jesus alone know what they’ve done with the place in these degenerate times,” said Cuthbert cheerfully. His tone belied his thoughts, however. They flickered through a succession of images: standing at night on the lip of a cliff overlooking the Clean Sea, the largest thing he’d ever seen in his life until then; staring out into the endless expanse of the Mohaine Desert; turning his back to the smoking ruin of Gilead and setting out into a world in which he no longer had any sort of place at all.

As they stepped beyond the marker, past the borders of the world which either of them had ever previously known, Alain reached out and took his hand.

\---

The slope of the hill was deceptively gentle. Susannah felt it in the way gravity pressed her back against her chair, and heard it in Eddie’s rough breathing as he pushed her. Felt it, too, in her own arms, as she gave what assistance she could wheeling her freight up the incline. But it didn’t seem like so much, until they finally reached the top of it and she looked back and saw just how long a way they had come, and then looked ahead and saw just how high up they were.

Beyond the crest upon which they stood, the hill dropped sharply off, no longer gentle at all. The road they were on swooped down to follow it and then leveled out across the lush plains, a straight white path cut through the nodding grass.

“Why,” she said, in the same hushed and awed tone as she might have used inside of Notre Dame, or some other vast and beautiful and holy place, “it looks the way our Great Plains must have looked once upon a time.”

Grass rose high as a man, green and yellow and even more fabulous colors - she swore that here and there she saw stipplings of purple, blue, even bright splashes of red - waving and rippling in the wind just like the rolling foamy tides of the sea. Here and there were stands of trees, tall with slender trunks and wide, spreading tops. Dotted across the vast plains were herds of grazing animals, just specks from their distance - she couldn’t be sure, but they were so huge and shaggy and dark that her first thought was  _ buffalo _ .

The forest swept out in a curve to the side, one last promontory thrust out into the flat prairie like a vast clenched fist. From that fist flowed a vast river, easily two miles wide from bank to bank. 

And beyond the river lay the city.

It rose high into the sky, airy spires and towering skyscrapers, bridges and turrets, looking like nothing so much as a dream sprung from the drowsy summer landscape before them. Gazing upon it, she felt a sudden sharp pang of homesickness for New York drive into her heart like a nail into an unsuspecting foot.

“That,” Roland whispered, pointing, “is the River Send. Amazing. I never thought to see it in my lifetime… I halfway didn’t believe it was real, like the Guardians.”

“You know, I am beginning to think we ought to have brought our amahs with us,” said Cuthbert, “for surely their fae-tales would be of greater use to us than any of the education good old Master Vannay provided.”

“What’s  _ that _ ?” Susannah asked, flipping her hand out towards the horizon in the same way she often saw the three gunslingers do. None of them needed to ask what part of it she meant.

“That,” Cuthbert answered her, “is the great city of Lud.”

“It looks pretty much okay,” Eddie said hesitantly from above her. “Could that be possible? Could it still be okay?”

Cuthbert and Roland exchanged a look. Roland opened his hand towards Cuthbert, who shrugged. 

“It could be,” said Cuthbert finally. “Anything is possible. Mayhap ‘twas only our small part of the world which ended, and they’ll welcome us into the light of civilization and hear our tales of barbarism with great sympathy. There might be sparklights, and running water…  _ hot  _ water, mind you, and bathhouses full of steam and comely young women eager to rub oil into our weary muscles…”

“I hope you’ll rustle up a couple of comely fellows for me.” Susannah put in

“I’ll oil you myself, should it come to that,” he told her, very solemn. “Eddie may take one side of you, and I the other. Could be that we shall be welcomed with such a scene. More like we shall find devastation and ruin and slow mutants.”

“What Bert means,” said Roland dryly, “is not to get your hopes up.”

“You’re just a real fuckin’ optimist, aren’t you?” Eddie grumbled. There wasn’t much force behind it, though. Susannah glanced up and got a good look at his face, and saw that even though he had been warned, his hopes were far up indeed. He looked over her head with a dreamy expression that said everything she needed to know. “Come on, guys, let’s knock one back for those wise fuckin’ elves, hey?”

He started forward, pushing her with the kind of wild enthusiasm that would have them fairly flying down the hill - maybe literally, if he hit a loose cobblestone or a wayward rock. Susannah was just about to tell him to slow down, as much as she loved the heady rush of the wind tearing past her face and her stomach floating up somewhere near her teeth, but before she could, Roland put out an arm and stopped him cold.

“Roland?” Susannah asked. “What’s wrong?”

Roland raised his arm and pointed with his truncated right hand, and he didn’t need to speak for them to see what he meant for them to see. Much nearer, between them and the city, was a circle of tall, oddly shaped stones. To Susannah’s eyes, it looked like Stonehenge, except never had a picture of Stonehenge - nor the sight of it in the flesh, as it were, for she had visited once - given her such a sensation of skin-crawling revulsion.

“That,” Roland said, “is a speaking ring. Those are standing stones. It is the home of an Oracle. I’ve met such before.”

That didn’t sound so bad - except it obviously was. Susannah’s guts were a cold lump sitting in the bottom of her stomach. She looked from one face to another, and saw that she was far from alone. Roland was grim, Cuthbert still as stone, Alain alarmed - and poor Eddie looked like he was about to be sick.

“Oh shit,” Eddie whispered. “Roland, I think that’s where the kid is gonna come through.”

Roland simply nodded. “It makes sense. They are thin places. Attractive places, as well. He was drawn to such a place before. It came very near to killing him, but I found him in time.”

“We gotta get there,” Eddie said, his voice trembling and breathless. “Now. Fuckin’ yesterday, man. We gotta go.”

“Is it going to happen today?” Roland had to be worried sick for the kid - Susannah was just sure he had to be, somewhere in there, but he sure didn’t show it. He stood with his arms folded, grim and impassive, his voice featureless.

“No…” Eddie looked towards Alain, who had shared his dreams these past weeks and seemed to know so much more. “I don’t - what do you think, man? That’s it, right? It’s there and it’s soon.”

“I believe you’re right,” Alain said. He didn’t sound any happier about it than Eddie did, though he was markedly calmer. “Mere the only may he might come through, and there it is before us.”

“Trouble,” said Cuthbert, “and in our road.”

Alain glanced at him, then looked back at Eddie. “Indeed. Calm yourself, Eddie - we must hurry, ‘tis true, but we gain naught from panicking.”

Being told not to panic, of course, completely broke what little control Eddie had. He lurched to the side and grabbed the front of Alain’s shirt, getting right up in his face. “Look, man, you don’t get it! I mean, I know you’ve been doing the dream-sharing thing, but you’re not the one who has to carve this fucking key! I’m supposed to do that, and I haven’t, and I’m supposed to do something else, and I don’t even know what it is, and if I fuck it all up then the kid’s gonna die and it’s gonna be  _ my fuckin’ fault _ !” His voice grew strained and watery towards the end there, as if he were on the verge of tears.

Alain very calmly put his hands over Eddie’s. A shiver of fear went dancing up Susannah’s spine. Though he didn’t seem mad, she couldn’t help but wonder what might push him to that point, and what he might do if he were pushed. None of these strange, dangerous men in whose company she and Eddie found themselves took well to being grabbed. Though Alain and Eddie were virtually the same height, Alain’s hands engulfed Eddie’s.

“I understand that it is a grave responsibility you bear. I understand the fear of failure. And yet you do no one any good by losing your wits.”

“You don’t  _ fucking get it  _ -”

“Do you think I have never borne this weight?” Alain asked softly. “Do you think I have never known that lives hung on my words, on my actions, and been thus afraid to peek? To - to  _ speak _ or act?”

Eddie simply stared, wild-eyed, his fingers clenching spasmodically in Alain’s shirt. 

“You must gather your courage. You must remember the face of your father -”

“I don’t care  _ dick _ about my father!” Eddie cried. He tried to push Alain away, or perhaps simply move back himself. Alain staggered, but then steadied himself, and held Eddie fast. “I wouldn’t know the guy if I ran into him on the street! The fuck you guys talking about, the face of my fucking father -”

“ _ Hush _ .” Alain didn’t raise his voice, but nonetheless, there was pure steel in the word. “You are afraid. I understand. Every man of us here has felt fear. You stand now at the crossroads of a choice, Eddie. Will you do what must be done, or will you be unmanned by your fear?”

Eddie stood very still. In the taut silence that stretched between them, his breath hitched awfully once, then twice, then three times, and then he opened his mouth and let loose a cry of such helpless despair that it wrung Susannah’s heart: “I don’t know what to  _ fucking do, man! _ ” 

He sagged miserably in Alain’s grip. Alain shifted his hold on Eddie and pulled him close, into a tight embrace, then turned him about to face Susannah. “Go to her,” he said very simply. “Take comfort. Find purpose. Find your center and do what can be done at your hands and yours alone.”

Susannah held her arms out wide for Eddie as he came blundering over. He dropped to his knees and pressed his wet face into her thigh, wrapping his arms around her legs and shuddering when she touched his hair and back. Before the two of them stood the gunslingers - she and Eddie were gunslingers, so they said, but she felt the divide between their two groups like never before. There was at least something like sympathy on Alain’s face. Roland still stood in that impassive way that suggested he was ready to stay there until sundown if need be. Cuthbert’s face, normally so expressive, showed nothing at all.

“Don’t you all have anything better to do than stand and stare?” she asked waspishly. Part of her knew it had needed to be done - but man alive, there wasn’t but an ounce of kindness between all three of them, was there? Alain had the gentlest manner out of them, but even then there was nothing there except for the unyielding expectation that Eddie would do what was needed. That they would all do what was needed.

Hard times, she supposed, bred hard men. These three had survived when, to hear them tell it, a whole world has perished. It hadn’t been kindness that brought them through that, no it had not been. The part of her that had once been Detta Walker knew all about that.

After a moment, Alain turned and touched Cuthbert’s elbow, drawing him aside. Roland glanced after them, then followed, though he cast an unreadable look over his shoulder at Susannah and Eddie as he did. 

Susannah stroked Eddie’s hair and rubbed his heaving back. It didn’t last long. Soon enough his breathing evened out and the tears stopped, and he raised his head and wiped his blotchy face. “Sorry,” he muttered, quietly enough that only she could hear. “I guess I’m still pretty much just the same old fuck-up, huh?”

“You’re not,” said Susannah fiercely. “You’re not and you can do what you need to do, Eddie, not because any old ka says so or because otherwise you won’t be a man, but because the good Lord gave you the guts to do it. It’s dead easy to do something that don’t scare you, isn’t it?”

Eddie let loose a watery little chuckle at that. “Yeah. Guess so.” For a moment longer, he stayed where he was, kneeling down and holding onto her hands, and then he wiped his face again and stood up.

“Come on,” he called dully. “I’m done throwing a fit, I guess. I’ll do it. Let’s go.”

And so in silence, they went, and by the time they stopped for the night, that circle of stones was looming practically right over them.


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aside from the fact of Cuthbert and Alain being alive in the first place, I think this marks one of our first major deviations from canon. There will be more to come!

They stood before the Speaking Circle, all of them silent. In the small hours of the morning, Roland had awoken them and driven them onward, and though it was now day, the scene had the same surreal feeling as a waking dream. Grey clouds covered the sun, so there was little light and barely any color to the world.

Cuthbert had never personally encountered an Oracle or a Speaking Circle. He knew of such things, of course, but had only ever seen them at a distance. On the handful of occasions during his long life when the group he traveled with had come across one, they’d gone well out of their way, typically warned by Alain that they approached something it was best to steer clear of.

He admitted a certain macabre fascination. Tall, lush grass grew all around it, but within the circle of stones was only bare earth, dotted with ancient bones - and some not so ancient. Animals, most of them, but he saw in one place half of a skull sticking up out of the earth which could only have belonged to a man. Such signs felt almost heavy-handed; the place simply reeked of - not malice, exactly, but some cruel and alien thing, some deeply inhuman existence.

He looked around at his companions. Alain was pale, his eyes huge, and though he was not a terribly expressive man, Cuthbert could see well enough the signs of fear in his face. No doubt he felt it far more clearly than any of them did, and knew better just what they were walking into.

Eddie, by contrast, seemed nearly hypnotized. He shifted and jigged in place, unable to hold himself still even for a moment. Restless energy poured off of him in waves. They had come to the place where he must now midwife the boy into their world, and he was frantic to get it done.

“There’s something here, isn’t there?” Eddie asked. “Something we can’t see.”

“It isn’t here yet,” said Roland. “But this is its place, yes. Our life-force will draw it here as soon as we step into the circle.” He dropped his hand to the butt of his gun, and turned to Susannah. “Susannah. We may have need of you.”

Sensing the lay of Roland’s thoughts, Cuthbert shifted his purse down off his back and began to rummage through it.

“I would certainly hope so,” she said, in that dryly cultured tone she took on when she thought one of them was being an especial idiot.

Roland either didn’t notice or took no mind. “When we enter the circle, the demon that makes this place its home will go for Eddie. One of us must keep it off him.” For a moment he did not speak, and when he did, it was in a stiff manner that Cuthbert knew meant he felt awkward about what he was saying. “A demon’s weapon is sex, but that is also its weakness. That is the method by which it can be turned from its target. I have not the words to say this in a gentle or refined way, but -”

“One of us is going to have to fuck it,” Susannah broke in. “I’m familiar with the concept. That’s what you’re saying, right? This kinda thing can’t ever turn down a free fuck.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” said Roland, relieved no doubt that she had said it for him.

“So if it’s a woman, you get it, and if it’s a man, then I get it, is that about the way of it? What if it goes both ways, huh?”

Before this could go any further, Cuthbert stepped forward, the wrapped object he had sought clutched in one hand, and cleared his throat loudly. Roland and Susannah both started and looked at him; neither Alain nor Eddie did. Both of them had their attentions fully absorbed by the circle. That was fine.

“Roland,” he said, letting an appalled tone creep into his voice, “do you truly mean to just let the lady do it? When I’m standing right here? Your willingness is laudable, Susannah, but, why, it would be simply unconscionable.”

A sort of rueful look crossed Roland’s face. “If you wish to take this task onto yourself, then I shall not deny you.”

“I don’t think that I could ever live with myself knowing I had put a fine lady through such a thing,” Cuthbert declared, putting his hand to his heart. “Gladly enough I’ve used my body in service of our quest, and what is this but one more such time, and one that I am uniquely suited to, at that? Male or female, I’ve got the thing coming and going, and I daresay the rest of you would be of more use protecting Eddie and giving him any help he may need.”

Susannah still looked at him with utter incomprehension. Roland, though, took his meaning well enough. “Then it is decided. Cuthbert will distract the demon. Alain, I want you at Eddie’s side to offer what help you may. Susannah and I will act as backup.”

And just like that, it was decided. Here was Roland, the commander; Roland, the prince; Roland, who had once led armies, and whose troops now consisted solely of the four ragged gunslingers in his blended ka-tet.

As soon as Eddie first stepped foot between the stones to enter the circle, it began to rain. He took no notice. He made his way to the center of the place and then knelt down. In one hand he held a sharpened stick; in the other, the key. These were his weapons.

Cuthbert watched long enough to be sure that he had his place, and that Alain had his place beside him, and then turned his attention to his own business. He unbuckled his many belts and set them aside, for neither his guns nor his knife nor his slingshot would be of use in this upcoming contest. He removed his boots and stood them beside his belts, then undid the ties of his pants and shucked them off. These he folded up and placed atop his pack on the ground, to keep as much of the mud off as possible. 

After a moment’s thought, he removed his shirt and undershirt as well, and placed them, folded, atop his pants. Demons, he suspected, were not gentlemanly, and he didn’t wish to have his clothes rent apart, nor made filthy from rolling about in the mud.

From his pack he’d taken the longstick, as well as the collection of straps and buckles needed to affix it to his body. Midway through undressing, though, he realized it would not be needful. The demon was male. The sheer, oppressive masculinity of it rolled like a fog of musk across the clearing. Unpleasantly, the scent it brought to the forefront of his mind was his father’s, barely remembered from a childhood so long ago it seemed to be a dream: leather, gun oil, shaving soap. 

He was no woman, and surely such a creature would understand the truth of the ka which lived within him without regard to the physical state of his body, but at the same time, it didn’t truly want a  _ woman _ \- it wanted a cunt.

He laid down on the ground, already beginning to go slimy and sticky from the rain, and reached out to the rushing force of the demon. Touch-blind, he nonetheless had developed a talent for doing so over the years, for touching a mind which could be touched or opening himself up. And so he made himself welcoming to the thing as it came. He made himself open. He leaned back on his elbows in the mud, bare skin slicked with rain, and spread his long legs invitingly.

It descended upon him. Invisible, its presence could be deduced by its effect on him. His legs were forced even farther apart, until the long muscles of his thighs screamed with the strain. Greedily, it pawed and groped at him, and the indents of its clawed fingers were visible on his sides, his hips, his breasts. Its weight pressed him flat onto his back.

“That’s right,” he breathed up to it. “You come over here and we can have a nice, good time all to ourselves.” Though he tried for flirtatious, his voice was mostly thin and breathless and strained. Fear washed through him. He had an idea that the demon fed on the fear as much as on the sex.

It pinned him down, covered him, and then took him. Some terrible cold thing probed against him, testing the angle. It bumped bluntly against his thigh, and for a moment the thing simply rutted against him, but then it shifted and then all it once it was all the way inside him. A pained cry escaped him. It was huge and cruel and cold and hooked. His head lolled back, into someone’s cushioning hand. When he opened his eye, he saw Susannah’s face above his, her eyes wide and bewildered and terribly concerned. 

From his blind side came Roland’s voice: “Don’t fight it. It will use you unto death if you do.” That was right - Roland had given himself over to such a demon. 

Cuthbert struggled to breathe. The thing rutting atop him filled him so completely that there wasn’t room inside him for his lungs anymore. The pain was paralyzing. It was all he could think of. His whole awareness narrowed down to his cunt, dry and clenching tight in a futile effort to keep the invader out.

He sank deeper into himself, into the battle mind, into a place he had gone a time or two before. This was not the first time he’d put his body to use in this wise for the sake of their quest, as he’d said. It was rare that he let anyone but Roland or Alain fuck him thus, but there had been a time or two that a man whose favor they needed had insisted on taking him front or back, and he had bent or spread as was needed. There had been a time or two when he’d found it easier to leave his body and let it be used, and come back later to the soreness, the ache, the unpleasant burn of having been stretched too far too fast or fucked too dry.

This was worse. It engulfed him entirely, inside and out. He felt not as if he were making use of the body he had been given but as if he were being defiled. He felt helpless. 

It gave him visions that had never happened. In the darkness behind his eyelid he saw the face of Roland’s father, red and sweat-slicked, mouth open and panting as he rutted into the cleft between Cuthbert’s legs, and a wave of sick shame washed over him. He saw the face of Marten Broadcloak. He saw Jamie’s father, those cool grey eyes stripping him not only of clothing but of skin, of muscle, down to his bones, down to his soul. He saw the face of Chris Johns, of his own father, of men he had no names for, and it was as if they were all taking him at once, tearing him to pieces between their many grasping hands - 

“Cuthbert,” came Roland’s voice at his ear. A hand clutched onto his shoulder, not a hand like the one clawing at his breasts but one he knew well, loved well. “Don’t  _ fight _ it.”

Cuthbert took a deep, shuddering breath. He opened his eyes. He looked up into Susannah’s face, then turned his head to look into Roland’s. Nearby Eddie drew his door, and Alain crouched awkwardly in the rain-churned mud to lend his help, and here Cuthbert lay between the other two, and here his attention had to stay. 

He reached up and felt for the demon. It was invisible, but it was not incorporeal. He touched what must have been its face, then its neck. He knit both his hands together around the back of its neck, so that its bulk supported his weight, and then shifted his hips to wrap his legs around it. Ungodly huge, it was, so that it was a strain - he was tall and long of leg and had been easily able to hook his ankles together even around Alain’s back, when Alain had still been able to get atop him and fuck him like this, but he couldn’t do so with the demon.

Still, it was something. He made himself relax, and tried to buck his hips up to meet its rhythm, as if he welcomed the intrusion.

And that was just the thing. As soon as he held on, as soon as he began to take  _ it _ rather than simply letting it take him, the demon tried to rear back. A sort of psychic shout filled his mind - no words, just the desperate horror of being trapped, a desire to be released - and overwhelming hunger to keep fucking him. 

Cuthbert bared his teeth and clenched his knees tighter against its hips. “Oh, no,” he panted, each word driven from him like a punch to the gut by the force of the demon’s thrusts. “You shan’t escape that easily, no you shall not.”

The pain changed. The fear changed. They were still there, but now atop them was a sense of savage triumph in having caught the thing. He had made his mind and body into a trap and it had come blundering in, and maybe it had him, but he had it as well, and he wasn’t going to let it go until he was good and ready.

\---

Alain did not spare the scene going on behind them a glance. He could not afford to. The demon’s presence came too near to overwhelming him even when it was focused on Cuthbert. A powerful desire came over to him to go to it, to lay down and let himself be taken and used until he was used up. It would draw all the force of life from his body, and yet he also knew that he would experience such ecstasy as it did so that he wouldn’t care to disengage.

So he did not pay it any mind. He focused, instead, on Eddie. Their task was deceptively simple. Eddie had to draw the door, carefully enough that it would work, and then it was time for him to open it. On the other side lay Jake - and something else. Something stirred in the place between their worlds, in the space between this door and the one that Jake would open.

Eddie drew the beginning of a door - the lintel, perhaps, and nothing else - and then stopped and looked up at Alain with wide, frightened eyes. “There’s a monster,” he whispered. “Over there. Not like - “ he glaned over his shoulder, to where Cuthbert was dealing with the demon, and then quickly away, a dull shamed sort of flush coloring his face - “not like that, but something else.”

“Yes,” Alain said simply. He reached out and clasped Eddie’s hand in both of his. “Jake must overcome it. You must open the way for him to get through before it can take him. Draw, for your father’s sake!”

Eddie drew. The rain came harder, churning the ground to mud. Alain drew forth the sturdy bear’s pelt from his pack and lumbered awkwardly to his feet to hold it out over Eddie, shielding him and the door from the rain, but it wasn’t enough.

“Roland!” he called. “Come here, now! Help me keep the rain off!”

He did not look up to see if he was heard or obeyed. Creeping in around the edge of his thoughts was the infernal tempting of the demon - when it realized that sheer lust would not move him, it instead changed tack and tried jealousy. A jealous man he was not, but he didn’t know that he could stay fast if he looked and saw what the thing was doing to Cuthbert.

Momentarily, Roland joined him, another hide held stretched between his hands. He was taller than Alain and longer of limb, and could therefore cover more. Between the two of them, they kept Eddie and the ground he drew on dry.

It wasn’t enough room to draw a properly sized door. Alain did not have the knowing of how, exactly, buildings were made in Eddie’s where and when, but the area they were able to keep dry was small all the same. It was enough room to admit a boy, or a man if he squeezed, and it would therefore be enough.

Once he’d drawn the knob and keyhole, it pushed up from the earth and became dully gleaming brass. The whole shape of the door hardened and darkened, effecting a transformation from crude drawing to portal. 

Hail began to pelt them. Roland dropped the hide he had been holding and left. Alain let his fall as well and stayed right where he was, though he reached down to touch Eddie’s shoulder, to reach through him and offer him what strength he could. Eddie’s presence made this place very thin, and he was able to reach across to Jake - who was in terrible peril. Things might move faster on their side, but they surely did not have time to spare.

“Open it, Eddie,” he urged, at the same time as he called Jake to them, to the correct place. The house - the thing shaped  _ like _ a house - which Jake was in would trick him, and if he lingered too long - if he did not find the door - if this went on much longer -

Eddie put down the stick and took the key up in his trembling hand.

Alain held his breath. Between the demon just behind him and the monstrous presence lurking in the space between the two doors, there barely felt to be room in his mind for himself.

Eddie put the key in the lock. He tried to turn it. It wouldn’t turn.

He stared at it, dumbfounded. Then he turned his face up to the sky, to the pelting wind and bruising hail, and howled wordless despair up into the storm. There was no answer, none at all. 

Alain squeezed his shoulder, perhaps hard enough to bruise. He did not speak, but pushed into Eddie’s mind that he must  _ concentrate _ . He reached in and set his own awareness as a block against everything else, leaving Eddie alone in that space until he saw the distant coldness of the battle mind drop over him, and knew that Eddie could act.

“Knife,” Eddie said, holding out his hand. Without pause or question, Roland pulled his own knife from his belt and slapped it into Eddie’s palm, then disappeared once more towards Cuthbert and Susannah. With terrible, infinite care, Eddie pulled the key from the lock and began to carve at it. 

It was not, in the end, even much. He took a few nearly translucent shavings from the curve at the end of the key, evened out one of the points, and then dropped the knife into the mud. 

This time, when Eddie put the key in the lock, it turned and the door opened.

\---

Never in his long life had Cuthbert been so exhausted. The muscles of his thighs and stomach screamed, his hips ached, and his spine crackled with every rolling thrust. His breath rasped in his throat, hot and dry. His cunt was nearly numb, a strange feeling that rose and spread up inside of him, so that he was by dint of the sensation of numbness able to feel internal portions of himself he was not typically so aware of.

Nor was his exhaustion simply physical. The trap he held the demon in was as much in his mind as it was his body, and he was fast tiring. Why he was even doing it, he didn’t know anymore, not entirely. There was some vague awareness, but mostly all he knew was that he had to keep the awful thing atop him - inside of him - from leaving.

So it was he barely noticed as strong hands took him beneath the armpits and hauled him up, nor as a man’s arms wrapped around his chest to move him. Distantly he took note of the way being so jostled changed the feeling of being fucked by the demon, but at that point he could have dangled upside down from a tree and not been shed of it. It was embedded in his body and mind like a hook in the throat of a fish.

Then a voice spoke in his ear. The voice of his dinh, the voice of ka, a voice he could not disobey: “Let it go.  _ Let it go _ , Bert, now!”

With a sob of relief, he let it go. The thing immediately ripped itself free of him - he had done well to choke back his own cries until then, but the agony as it did so drew forth from his throat a proper scream - and left him lying on the ground, wet and cold and hurt and queerly empty.

He let his head fall back. This time it landed in a cushion of mud, for everyone else was quite busy. That was alright. He’d done his part.

After a moment - which could have been an eternity - another pair of hands caught his shoulders and shifted him. In a vague and distant way, all this tossing him about as if he were luggage was beginning to make him peevish. He forgave the owner of the hands almost immediately, though, for they brought his head and shoulders into a soft and warm lap and draped something over his body, something pleasantly heavy that covered him from the rain and driving hail.It had a soothingly familiar smell, too, one that made him feel warm and safe.

Blearily, he opened his eyes, and saw Susannah looking down at him, concern writ on every inch of her face. She’d pulled the bearskin - where she had gotten that from, he hadn’t a clue - over him, and now she touched his face, her hands blessedly cool.

She started to speak, but there was a great roaring and shouting and grinding of earth. Many voices shrieking all at once, a cacophony of overlapping sounds. Cuthbert propped himself up again on his elbows, too curious not to look despite the fact that most of all he wanted to sleep - a thousand years ought to do it, he reckoned, after this was done.

Of the demon there was no sign. Of Roland, neither. Eddie lay flat on his belly with both arms inside the doorway, and Alain had gone awkwardly down onto one knee in a way that Cuthbert knew had to be simply agonizing. He plunged his hands through the doorway as well, and grasped hold of something.

Grunting, straining, Alain reared back. Up out of the hole came a boy who - although Cuthbert had never seen him before - had to be Jake. He climbed out of the hole, clutching onto Alain, and then flopped out in the mud. Immediately, an arm shot up out of the hole - Roland’s right arm, the abbreviated hand with its missing fingers grabbing at the edge of the doorway to boost himself up. Eddie and Alain both grabbed and helped him out.

From the doorway itself came the most unearthly series of choking screams and howls. “Shut it,” Roland panted, rolling over onto his back. “For your father’s sake, Eddie, shut it at once!”

Eddie slammed the thing shut. It became merely dirt once more, an outline drawn in mud being quickly washed away by the rain.

The hail began to taper off. Seeing that their business was done and the boy safely drawn through - although he seemed, quite curiously, not to be wearing any trousers, and was theirs to be a pantsless party, then, traipsing nude through the land? - Alain hauled himself to his feet and lurched over to Cuthbert’s side, sitting heavily down right in the mud. 

“Art thou well?” he asked urgently, gripping one of Cuthbert’s hands. “What harm has that demon done thee?”

“Nothing I shan’t recover from quickly enough,” Cuthbert assured him. He sat up, letting the bearskin slip down around his waist. “I will be terrible sore for a time, though. Will’ee kiss it better?” 

“Hush thy mouth,” Alain said fiercely, and wrapped him in a tight embrace. Cuthbert was quite content to lean against Alain’s broad chest. He felt hollowed out and filthy.

Susannah slipped away as soon as he sat up, but came swinging herself right back over, his soaked clothing bundled up under one arm. “Here,” she said quietly, holding them out to him. She looked him up and down, a strange look on her face. It was unreadable, and for Cuthbert, that was an odd experience indeed.

“Seven blessings upon your father’s house,” said Cuthbert. He struggled gratefully into his undershirt and overshirt, though he elected not to try the pants just then. Between the rain and the mud and the lingering cold numbness, it was hard to tell, but he suspected he was bleeding, and didn’t care to try and scrub a bloodstain out of the crotch of his increasingly threadbare and battered jeans.

Alain helped him to his feet. He stood cautiously, half expecting that as soon as he did his guts would come spilling out - it felt as if the thing had ripped him open from cunt to breastbone when it tore itself free. That didn’t happen, but he felt a wet, sticky gush that he  _ knew _ meant he was bleeding. Resolutely, he turned his attention to the boy.

Roland had helped Jake to sit, and crouched beside him now staring at him as if he could not quite credit that the boy were real. Eddie hovered nearby, a look on his face as if he were overhearing some moment he preferred not to.

Jake looked around at all of them, and an expression came over him with which Cuthbert was very familiar. After a lifetime with Alain, how could he not recognize the sudden, mute shyness of being stared at by an entire crowd?

He tottered over and bent at the waist, not quite daring to try a crouch, and held his hand out. “Hile, Jake! Hile and well met.”

Looking dazed, Jake took his hand and allowed Cuthbert to pull him to his feet. He looked at Cuthbert’s face, then glanced down towards his bare legs, and then quickly back up at his face. “Are you okay?” 

Cuthbert chanced a look down at himself as well, still half sure in the back of his mind that if he did he’d see some dangling loop of intestine or something else equally vile. No such sight met him. A thin, smeary trickle of blood had made its way from beneath the hem of his shirt nearly to his knee, that was all.

“I am well and well enough,” he said, “but what about you? For you’ve had quite a journey, as I understand it.”

Jake nodded. He glanced around the assembled folk, then looked back at Cuthbert, and, frowning, said in a faintly apologetic manner, “I don’t think I’ve seen you before. I know Roland… and Eddie… and I’ve seen him -“ this said with a nod in Alain’s direction - “but I don’t think I know anyone else.”

“Why, I am Cuthbert, son of Robert, and these are my only slightly less storied and worthy traveling companions, who of course shall be introduced to you posthaste - but let us leave this ghastly place behind us first, eh?”

There was no argument on that score. They gathered up their paltry effects and decamped to a copse of trees which kept the worst of the rain off. Cuthbert did not lean on Alain as they walked, but only because it was quite a short walk. Even so, by the time they reached the copse of trees, he was trembling like a leaf in a high wind, and the numbness had left him entirely. In its place was hot, grasping pain which throbbed up into his belly from between his legs.

He cinched the bearskin in place around his waist using his belts. In his mind he had a suspicion he might be wearing it thus for some time, for the bruised and torn flesh between his legs would surely be only further irritated by the rubbing of denim or leather. It handily covered everything that needed covering, and kept his sore parts from the bare ground when he sat, as well. 

They did not try to start a fire, for even beneath the cover of the trees, it was far too wet. They did all sit, though, Roland very close to Jake, and shared out what food they had. The boy had escaped his own world with minimal harm - there was a nasty bite on the back of his neck, angrily red and swelling, and he’d been bruised and scraped by the house-monster, but aside from the loss of his pants and shoes, he was unharmed.

It was decided without much need to confer at all that they would stay there the rest of the day. None of them felt fit to go on, and they could all benefit from a rest.

\---

The storm blew itself out within the next hour. Blue sky began to show through the clouds, and soon enough the only sign that there had ever been a storm was the water still dripping from the trees and beading on the tall prairie grasses.

Once the sun began to show its face again, Alain shook Cuthbert gently awake. He had fallen into a fitful doze, leaning against Alain’s shoulder, and though Alain was loathe to wake him out of it, it was necessary.

“Come,” he said quietly, “I would attend to your injuries.”

“Oh, yes,” muttered Cuthbert, still only half awake, “I am quite sure you would like to.” After some prodding, he rose, and allowed Alain to walk him around to the other side of the copse of trees, where they might have a bit of privacy.

There Alain sat him back down, leaning against the narrow trunk of a tree. He gathered up the driest of the fallen twigs and branches he could find, as well as the grass which grew in between the trees and had been spared the worst of the rain. With this he laid and then kindled a small fire. It burned smokily and slowly at first, but it did burn, and soon enough the heat of the flames dried the rest of the kindling out enough that it caught as well.

“If you pull out the cauter,” Cuthbert spoke up from beside him, “I am getting up and leaving.”

“Pray God I’ve no need to,” Alain replied. He had no intention of doing so. Searing shut the torn flesh would do more harm than good in such a delicate place. 

What he did, when the fire was going well, was pull a small steel cookpot from his purse and then pour a measure of carefully hoarded vinegar into it. Into this he laid a square of leather. He put the vinegar back into its place - only a couple of fingers of it sloshed in the bottom of the bottle, and it was very sour, but it would be useful for cleaning out the wounds - and then went slowly through his much reduced supply of tonics and draughts until he came upon a couple designed to reduce pain and inflammation. He had nothing in his supply that was specifically meant to be healthful for the womanly parts; if and when Cuthbert had ever needed medical aid in that area before, he had not gone to Alain about it.

Still, what he had would have to be good enough. He dipped his hands into the vinegar, not boiling yet but getting quite hot, and scrubbed them to get them clean, then went and sat between Cuthbert’s legs.

He wet another cloth with mere water from his waterskin, and used that to carefully clean away the blood drying on Cuthbert’s thighs, and then from around his sex itself. That was trickier; it had dried and clotted in the wiry hair there, and he didn’t wish to pull, given how tender everything must be. Already, beneath the blood and hair, the skin there was darkening up to an ugly bruisey shade.

“So what’s the word?” asked Cuthbert, craning his head to watch Alain poke about between his legs. “Shall I keep the use of it, or must I become celibate in my old age?”

“You’ll heal, I imagine. I don’t think you’ll be walking for some time, though.” Gingerly, Alain parted his lips, to see what might be seen with his eyes and his fingers. There was tearing, and fresh welling blood, and all of the delicate flesh both inside and out was hot and swollen and quite tender, if the way Cuthbert’s muscles tensed and his breathing stuttered was any indication.

Alain put his hands low on Cuthbert’s belly, spanning the width of his body, his thumbs touching just over where the thatch of his pubic hair began. Closing his eyes, he let his awareness sink deep into Cuthbert’s body. The pain was, indeed, ghastly; feeling it made his own stomach churn nauseously. But he did not sense any damage to the internal organs, and thus concluded that while Cuthbert’s recovery would be unpleasant, he was in no danger.

Having so decided, he turned away, drew the cookpot off the fire, and - once the liquid inside had cooled enough to do so - pulled the soaked cloth out so that he might go over everything he had cleaned even more thoroughly, and disinfect as well as remove the blood.

That was far more trying. Cuthbert was very manful about it, but he was trembling and letting loose urgent, hurt noises by the time Alain finished. Never had Alain been happier to tip a draught for pain into his mouth. He gave quite a lot of it, though he had little left and needed it often himself.

There they stayed for a time. Alain gathered up his belongings, cleaned Cuthbert’s blood from the two squares of cloth he had used, and dumped out the soiled vinegar. Then he simply sat beside Cuthbert, stroking his hair, and waited for the pain to subside. Once Cuthbert was once more able to put on a brave face, Alain helped him up and they rejoined the company of their fellows.

Eddie, Susannah, and Jake had formed a little circle, and were talking to each other about the world they all shared, and how it had changed in the decades which separated each of them. Susannah glanced up as they returned, and seemed perhaps about to say something, but then went back to the conversation she had been having.

Cuthbert found a spot where two trees grew very close together that he could recline in comfortably, and went promptly back on his way to sleep again. Reluctant to leave his side, though he knew there was little else he could do, Alain sat beside him.

After a moment, Roland came over and crouched down on Bert’s other side. Cuthbert’s eye opened halfway, and then closed again once he saw that it was only Roland.

“Is he well?” he asked Alain.

Anger swept through Alain, sudden as a summer storm, all the worse for how unexpected it was. No one had forced Cuthbert to do as he did, least of all Roland - and yet Alain found himself biting down on his own tongue to keep from saying some harsh word to his dinh which he might regret.

“He is blind,” murmured Cuthbert, his eye still closed, “not deaf, and he is trying to rest.”

“Well enough,” Alain said eventually. “Better if we let him be.” So saying, he levered himself to his feet and lumbered over to sit near the group of outworlders. As much as he wished to fuss over Bert, he wished, as well, to meet this boy whose fate was woven so strongly into theirs. 

And he did not wish to be angry with Roland. It had taken Roland some hours to ask, true, but then, had Alain not had his back turned the whole time Cuthbert was engaged with the demon? He could not claim, either, that the idea they might suffer harm in Roland’s service was somehow new. 

As soon as he came over, Jake broke away from talking to Eddie - from what Alain could glean, it was of some form of play, perhaps, which he was excited to see - and looked at him with wide, shining eyes. “I saw you in my dream,” he said. “You told me where to go to find Eddie and his brother. It’s nice to, uh, actually meet you.”

“It’s nice to meet you as well,” Alain said. “I am Alain.” As they spoke, he wondered how much the boy remembered of that dream.  _ We’ve all died for him. It’s cold. _ In the flesh, the boy’s power in the touch was obvious. He practically glowed in Alain’s awareness, even when Alain was not looking at him. At the soonest possible opportunity, Alain would have to speak to him of it and tutor him if he could. A mind so powerfully open could be dangerous indeed if left untrained.


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note, as we finish up this installment: I took a long break from this fic for NaNo, and have been working on various other personal projects in the meantime. I've also been slammed at work and, just recently, gotten sick. This series isn't abandoned, but updates from now on are going to be slow, since I've worked through my backlog. I appreciate all your patience, comments, and kudos!

Susannah was not an impulsive person. She liked to think about things. She’d loved the atmosphere of college, one where parties would go on all night full of clever people smoking and sharing drinks and just  _ talking _ about things, exploring ideas like they were endless, like the purpose of a question wasn’t an answer but the process of asking it. And sometimes, yes, it had been exasperating or frustrating, because there was a practical side to her that thought some of those folks were mighty far up themselves, and sometimes complicated didn’t mean better, but all the same it had been a fascinating time.

So she held onto what she had seen, and she thought about it. No one else spoke up. That Eddie didn’t surprised her; she could only assume he hadn’t noticed.

She wasn’t even sure, at first, what it was she  _ had _ seen - except she knew she was. It just didn’t make sense. But the more she dwelled on it, the more she remembered bits and pieces - things people had said, ways they’d acted - and, gradually, she felt that she had begun to wade onto solid ground.

So, two days later, she roped Eddie in.

That night she waited until she was sure everyone was asleep. Alain snored, so he was easy. Roland and Cuthbert didn’t, but Cuthbert hadn’t exactly been bounding around full of energy just lately, and Roland slept far away from them, on the other side of Cuthbert and Alain. Jake lay between them, the bridge between their two groups, and he, Susannah knew, knocked out about as soon as he laid down every night. The poor kid was still feverish from that spider bite, and the antibiotics made him sick on top of that.

Once the sound of Alain’s snoring began drifting across their little camp, Susannah sat up and started patting at Eddie’s face. She didn’t want to risk waking anyone, and the gunslingers all had amazingly sharp ears.

Eddie’s reflexes were getting sharp, too. After just a couple of pats, he sat up, blinking the sleep from his eyes.

A year ago, Susannah would have thought a night like this was too dark to see in. Now, though darkness did hang heavy as a velvet curtain over everything, she could see well enough by the light of the moon. It gleamed wet and bright off Eddie’s open eyes.

“Whuzzit, Suze?” he asked blearily. “Somethin’ wrong?”

“Shh.” She glanced over at the others, but they kept on sleeping just the same. “Eddie,” she asked, very quietly, “did you know Cuthbert is a woman?”

“ _ What?” _ asked Eddie, very loudly and incredulously.

“Shh!” Susannah briefly put her hand over his mouth, looking pointedly at the dark sleeping shapes of the others and then back at him. “Quiet, I don’t want to wake anybody else up.” Just why that was, she couldn’t exactly say, but she knew she wanted to have this talk as privately as was possible.

“Okay, okay,” Eddie whispered. “But what the hell do you mean? He’s not -”

“How much did you see of what went on with that whole… thing?” Even now, she wasn’t sure what to call it. “When we brought Jake through.”

Eddie shrugged. “I don’t know. Not that much. I mean, I know he, you know,  _ distracted _ the demon, but I wasn’t exactly watching the show. I was pretty focused on making the door.” A pause, and then, “I think the big guy was kind of  _ keeping _ me focused, too, if you know what I mean.”

Susannah did know. That gave rise to a whole new line of thought: how easily could Alain just keep anyone from noticing? It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, but it spooked her a bit just to know how simple it seemed to be for him to go mucking around in people’s brains. When he touched them, they knew, but she had an idea it was only because he wanted them to know. 

“Well,” she said, abandoning that line of thought for the moment, “I was right there, and I know what I saw.” As much time as she’d spent wondering, there was precious little doubt. She felt a bit like a midwife herself. “I’m pretty familiar with what a woman’s privates look like, since I’ve had a set myself my whole life.”

“That doesn’t make sense, though,” Eddie argued. “I mean, if he’s a woman, then why - like, when I talked to Alain about the whole, you know, marriage thing, he was pretty clear about being into guys. Why would he lie about that?”

Why a man would claim to be a homosexual rather than admit the person he was married to was female, Susannah could not imagine. Still, a part of her felt like it almost made more sense. She’d been surprised indeed to learn the depth of their relationship from Eddie, and the idea that Alain was simply in the know about Cuthbert’s secret - but dedicated enough to keeping it that he’d say such a thing about himself - was almost easier to absorb than the idea of two men being happily married for decades.

“I don’t know why. But I’m sure of what I saw, Eddie.”

“Why would he even be pretending at all?”

That, at least, Susannah had an answer for. She remembered the ceremony where they’d been passed the guns, and the questions she and Eddie had asked afterwards, and a comment Cuthbert had made -  _ was a time we thought my father’s guns might pass to Roland.  _ At the time, she hadn’t thought much of it. In fact, she’d almost forgotten, but then that comment had resurfaced in her memory when she’d started searching for a reason why Cuthbert might be pretending to be a man, and she’d realized how odd it was. Cuthbert was  _ older  _ than Roland, so why would Cuthbert’s father think his guns would pass on to his distant relative instead of his own child - unless he had a daughter and not a son?

From there it had all become clear. “I think maybe it was kind of like the women who dressed up like men to join the Civil War,” Susannah said. “Women who dressed up as men to be cowboys and captains and all of that. Except I think maybe, you know, Dad wanted a son to pass his guns on to, so they, I don’t know - go have the baby out of town, or in secret, pay off the midwife, say it’s a boy - how many people are going to know to check?”

“Okay,” Eddie said, “Suze, I love you, but you know that sounds a little crazy, right? Cuthbert’s dad raised his daughter like a man so he could have a gunslinger kid, and now, what - I mean, Roland and Alain have to know, right? You can’t marry a guy and not know what kinda junk he’s packin’, right? Like what, on their wedding night he says hey, by the way, got my dick shot off in the war, and never takes his pants off?”

“They probably do. I think they do.” It made sense of Cuthbert’s strange remarks to Roland when Susannah had been about to volunteer to take on the demon herself. And Cuthbert had shown no hesitation in stripping right down, either. 

“So even if it was this big secret thing, why would they be keeping it a secret now? I mean, you’re a lady gunslinger, they don’t seem to have a problem with that. Why hide it?” 

This, Susannah knew, was just something Eddie did. He argued. She didn’t mind. On the contrary, it helped to lay the idea out to him and see where the weak spots were. This, probably, was why she’d wanted to talk it out with him before she said anything to anyone else.

“I don’t know exactly why,” she admitted. “Maybe it just became a habit. Maybe we’re okay with it, you know, being that we’re from more modern times, but the places they’ve been with people wouldn’t be okay.” She was happily and proudly a woman, and wouldn’t have switched given the chance - but to pretend to be a man sometimes? To be able to pass for a man in situations where being a woman was dangerous or inconvenient? To just be able to see, for a few hours or a day or a week, what it was like to be treated like a man? She couldn’t say she’d turn that down.

“Okay, so, say you’re right - what’re you gonna do about it? Hey, I see you got a pussy, welcome to the club, let me tell you about feminism? Looks like you got the pants down already?”

“Well, I want to say  _ something.” _ Just what, she wasn’t sure, but she would figure it out. “I mean, that’s so sad, isn’t it? To have to pretend to be something you’re not for your whole life. They always go on about how we’re ka-tet and we need to be open with each other, so they need to be open with us, too, right?”

\---

Two days after that, she got her chance. Cuthbert wasn’t up to walking - recalling the glimpse she had gotten of the demon and that awful hooked penis it’d been sporting, she wasn’t surprised - and so they’d worked out a system where Eddie, Roland, and Alain carried her in the piggyback harness and Cuthbert got the chair. As much as Susannah hated the harness, she bit down on her complaints, for she surely would not have wanted to have been in Cuthbert’s position instead.

There had been an awkward moment the day before when Jake had asked - somewhat guiltily - how exactly Cuthbert got hurt. He’d been handed a vague non-explanation the day he’d been drawn through, for it was obvious then that something was wrong, but no one had really spoken of it beyond that. The ensuing conversation made it clear that Jake knew it had to do with bringing him through and felt that, in some oblique way, it might be  _ his fault _ .

“Why,” Cuthbert had assured him, while Susannah went tense waiting to see what sort of explanation might be given, knowing that the gunslingers had fairly lax ideas about what was or wasn’t appropriate for children, “I’ve suffered a bit of an injury to the fundament, I have, and being a lazy sort of fellow, I’ve used it to get out of walking for a time.” This followed by an outrageous wink, as if somehow they were sharing confidence in the middle of a crowd of five. It had reassured Jake, at least, that no one blamed him.

That day, Eddie was wearing the harness, and had taken over pushing the chair as well. Cuthbert was in fine spirits, chatting and laughing and remarking breezily on how convenient being so transported was. Once they’d gotten going, Susannah reached up and tugged a lock of Eddie’s hair, then whispered in his ear.

Gradually, Eddie slowed down, until the others had outpaced them enough she thought they could have a private conversation. 

Glancing around, Cuthbert asked, very casually, “So do you mean to kidnap me, then? ‘Tis unsporting to take advantage of a man in such delicate circumstances, you know.”

“No one’s kidnapping anyone,” Susannah said over Eddie’s shoulder. “I just wanted to talk.”

Twisting around, Cuthbert glanced up at them, smiling wryly. “And what is it you wish to speak of that can’t be said in front of my two oldest and dearest friends, then?”

Faced with the question so directly, Susannah wasn’t sure how to say it. Finally, she decided to just forge ahead and be blunt - Cuthbert did seem difficult to offend. “I was right there when you were dealing with the demon. I know you’re not a man.”

“Oh? Do you, now?”

The awkwardness rolling off of poor Eddie was palpable. Susannah gave his shoulder a pat and soldiered on. “Yes. I don’t know what’s up here - if you want to tell me, I’ll listen, of course - but I just wanted to let you know that it’s silly to keep pretending with just the five of us here. You don’t have to pretend to be a man to do - whatever it is you want to do.”

There was a long, reflective silence. Amusement still shone from Cuthbert’s face, but it was tempered by something more serious. Eventually, Cuthbert said, “Please tell me, I’m curious. What do you think I’ve been… pretending for?”

“Well…” There was some underlying hint of sarcasm to Cuthbert’s tone that made Susannah feel very doubtful. Still, she had been asked to say what she thought, and so she would. She wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, even if she might feel foolish afterwards. “I remember you said, after the gun ceremony, that you guys thought Roland might get your father’s guns for a time. So what I’m thinking is that your dad wanted a son and raised you that way. I don’t know when or how Roland or Alain found out, although they’ve got to know, and I don’t know why you’d be keeping it up when it’s just the three of you, but that’s what I’ve got.”

Another silence. “Do you know,” Cuthbert said, very thoughtfully, “that many folk in the high court of Gilead, and not a few of my fellow ‘prentices, said much the same?”

Now she knew that something was off. Cautiously, she said, “They did?” Which could only mean it wasn’t the secret she thought it was, but -

“I shall give you a lesson in language, shall I? You two know the many meanings of ka. One such is ‘spirit’, or ‘soul’, or otherwise the essence of a person. Yes?” Cuthbert looked back at them, smiling a sharp-edged sort of smile. “Here is another one:  _ shume _ , which means death, or defection, or breaking. Ka-shume refers to the breaking of a tet, for instance. And here is a third:  _ ki _ , a prefix, which refers most often to the body, and specifically the more vulgar parts and urges. The genitals and waste parts, the guts, the emotions that come from there. So if I say to you the phrase ka-ki’shume, what would you venture to say it means?”

“A… a disconnect,” Susannah ventured, when it became clear Cuthbert truly expected an answer, and was not going to provide one, “between the body and the - the spirit?”

“That’s exactly right. That’s how such a one as I was referred to in Gilead. The ka of a man placed within a womanly body, for what purpose only fate itself would know. I understood myself well from a very young age, and was blessed with parents who listened. Others don’t, or aren’t - indeed, ‘tis not common to know so surely so young, and there were rumors and rumors just such as you said, Susannah, that my father had coached me for the sake of having an heir.”

“So…” Susannah groped for the thread of the conversation. What Cuthbert said was clear enough, and yet the concept was strange to her. “So you mean to say you really are a man? You’ve lived as a man on purpose, and not - not any other reason?”

“Do you not have such a concept where you come from?” Cuthbert asked, curious. He did not sound upset, exactly, but there was still that edge to his voice. Susannah sensed that she tread on unsteady ground, and could easily misstep. “It surprises me, given the wonders of your civilization which I have seen, that it also seems so regressive on such matters. Alain told me of his conversation with you, Eddie, about men who favor men - I must admit to being quite confused that you come from a place where it is not simply recognized that such occurs, for surely it is obvious to anyone with eyes. Is my situation the same, then?”

“We-ell,” Eddie hedged, “I’ve known a couple people kinda like that - like, the whole transvestite thing, I guess? Men who want to be women, I know about that, I’ve met a couple. I was pretty good friends with a lady like that for a little while, in fact. She was a hooker, but, you know, funny as hell and real smart. I guess I’ve never really met anyone who did it the other way around, but hey, takes all kinds, right?”

"Was she one of your girlfriends?" Susannah asked curiously.

"No! No, I mean - not that I'd have a problem, like, dating a girl like that, I guess," he added, somewhat hastily. "But no."

“So everyone else just knows, then?” Susannah asked, as much taking pity on Eddie - who seemed quite flustered with that line of questioning - as she was still grappling with the idea. A sense of embarrassment began to steal over her. He didn’t seem offended, and yet - “You said people spread rumors about it, so, I mean…”

“Why, yes. There was quite a public ceremony recognizing me as my father’s son and legal heir.” Cuthbert looked at their shocked faces and laughed. “Very few things in the lives of nobility were private! My father was cousin to the dinh of Gilead’s wife, and so you can imagine the birth of his child did not go unremarked! To hear them tell it, there were a dozen or two folks in the room when my poor mother was laboring to bring me into the world.”

Susannah gave a sympathetic shudder. “That poor woman.” At least on Earth one only had to deal with the doctors and nurses in the delivery room.

“Indeed, I should not think I’d have liked to repeat the experience. But yes, Susannah, all of my peers and their parents were well aware. It has never been a matter of hiding anything, but simply of being legally recognized for what I am.”

Her face was hot. She didn’t know what to say, but she felt something was necessary. “I - I’m sorry. I… cry your pardon, I didn’t mean -”

“Oh, hush,” said Cuthbert. “‘Tis a clever enough reason you came to in order to justify what you thought, even if that turned out to be incorrect. I, for one, don’t believe in punishing someone for putting their brain to use. No offense was meant, I know that well enough. Did you wish to have the company of a woman? I can imagine you feel very alone in this group, at times. I am sorry to so disappoint you, but I do not take it hard, so long as the two of you take care not to go about treating me as a woman or some half-female creature.”

He extracted from them both promises not to do so, and there was silence for a time.

“Is that why you and the big guy were allowed to get married, then?” Eddie put in suddenly. “Like - because you could have kids?”

Cuthbert went quiet for a moment, and most of the amusement left his voice when he answered. “Aye, ‘tis so. It seemed a handy solution to the dilemma of both our parents of how to get an heir.”

“So did you guys ever - hey!” Eddie abruptly cut himself off, as Susannah pinched him.

“ _ Eddie _ ,” she muttered, warningly. Maybe Cuthbert wasn’t a woman, but she thought that as one herself she knew better than Eddie what that lowering of tone meant.

“No,” said Cuthbert, after a moment, and there was no hint anymore of amusement or wryness or sarcasm. “We never have. And I’m some years beyond the age where we might get a surprise, so I suppose it simply isn’t to be.”

At which point Eddie seemed to get it. “Oh,” he said, sounding like a kid shuffling his feet during a dressing down. “Sorry.”

“Such talk is not fit for mixed company,” Cuthbert said primly, and reached back to slap the back of his hand against Eddie’s chest. “Hie you push a little faster now! Gid’up! Catch us up to the others before they must send a search party out after us!”

**Author's Note:**

> I have taken some liberties with appearances, because many of these people just look a certain way in my head and canon be damned. Dark Tower fic means never having to say you're sorry!
> 
> Cuthbert in particular bears, in my mind, an uncanny resemblance to if Kuzco from The Emperor's New Groove were a real human being. You're all welcome for that fantastic new au, btw.


End file.
